Social listening tools are the perfect solution for people that wish to track what’s being said about their brand on social media. Such a tool tracks what people are posting about your brand, your hashtags, and your campaigns, so you can see it and act on it if needed.
The market for these tools is projected to reach $20.51 billion by 2031, according to Mordor Intelligence, which confirms what most marketing teams already know: watching your own hashtag manually doesn’t scale anymore.
Key takeaways
- Social listening tools go beyond counting mentions. The useful ones show you volume, sentiment, and source in one place.
- Monitoring and listening aren’t the same job. Monitoring catches the post. Listening tells you what it means.
- For brand hashtag monitoring, coverage matters more than any new AI feature. A tool that misses half your platforms isn’t helping you!
- Moderation isn’t optional once a hashtag is popular enough to attract spam or misuse.
A social listening tool watches social media for a specific set of terms, like a brand name, a hashtag, or a profile. It pulls in every post that matches the terms as it’s published. Some tools stop there. Others add a layer of analysis on top of that, looking for things like positive or negative feelings, common themes, and unusual activity.
For brand hashtag monitoring, this means tracking every post tagged with your campaign hashtag, plus the mentions that skip the tag entirely (a customer who posts a photo and forgets to add it is still talking about you). A tool built for this needs to catch both.
Start tracking posts tagged with your hashtag
People often use these terms interchangeably, but they describe different parts of the same job.
- Social media monitoring is the mechanical layer. It finds every post that uses your hashtag or mentions your username almost immediately.
- Social listening is a way of using online tools to understand what people are saying about your brand. It looks at everything that’s been monitored to see what people are feeling, what themes are coming up a lot, and any sudden changes.
To track hashtags, monitoring has to work first. A tool that does a good job of analyzing text still isn’t the right choice if it’s only catching half of your tagged posts to begin with. Think about how much information you have before you judge what you know.
Hashtag campaigns generate a lot of track. Posts may arrive in bulk around a launch, a conference, or a contest. They don’t arrive on a steady daily drip. If a tool is updated once a day, you might miss finding out about a great post or a problem.
Two things are making social listening a higher priority for marketers this year. AI can now automatically identify changes in tone. It can do this without needing someone to read every post by hand. Brands are tracking more than just text. They’re also tracking images, videos, and posts on newer, decentralized platforms. These platforms don’t offer built-in search the way older networks do.
It shows you what your audience thinks
Tags are a way to give unscripted feedback. A hashtag campaign can generate opinions, questions, and complaints that your survey data never captures. It’s usually easy to explain why mention volume spikes during a campaign once you can see the posts driving it. Good social media analytics turn that raw feed into a report that includes the number of posts, the positive or negative sentiment of the posts, and the source of the posts. This report can be used instead of a large number of posts that nobody has time to read one by one.
It keeps a live campaign visible while it’s happening
During an event or anything time sensitive, real-time hashtag tracking lets a team share a great post again or respond to a complaint while the moment is still live, not a week later in a report.
It keeps your brand safe from people who don’t use it correctly
A popular hashtag is also a target. To protect your brand from hashtag hijacking, you need to moderate your hashtags from the beginning.
It brings communities and conversations to your attention that you would otherwise miss
Tracking profiles alongside hashtags identifies brand mentions that do not use your official tag. People are often honest about this.
Coverage is the most important thing. A tool built for one or two networks doesn’t work for many hashtags, especially on Instagram, where content is pulled from hashtags and business profiles. It also doesn’t work for the newer, smaller networks that an older tool was never built to reach. Social media aggregation only works if it covers the platforms your audience actually uses.
Next, check how the tool finds content, not just which networks it watches. Basic tools only match exact hashtags. The best ones can track hashtags across networks. They use a combination of hashtags, keywords, and profiles. This helps catch misspellings, dropped underscores, and posts that mention your brand without the tag.
Filtering and moderation are just as important as coverage. If you don’t have control over the volume, you’re at a disadvantage. Ultimately you want to see what you can do with what the tool finds. A dashboard that only your team can see is better than a feed that you can also put on a website or an event screen.
How does AI help with detecting and moderating online opinions?
Larger listening platforms like Hootsuite have promoted AI sentiment analysis by using natural language processing to understand tone, slang, and context. This allows them to identify changes in how people feel about a brand, not just how often they mention it. This is according to Hootsuite’s own research on AI social listening. That’s the direction the whole category is heading: less manual digging, more automatic flags.
Walls.io uses that same idea at the campaign level. AI Moderation, the AI spam filter and AI sentiment filters that keep a social wall professional and on-brand, catches spam and off-tone posts automatically. This means that a human doesn’t have to review every single tagged post by hand before it’s safe to show anywhere.
Not every network gives you a search bar and an API. Monitoring mentions on decentralized platforms like Bluesky, where posts are collected using keywords, hashtags, lists, and profiles rather than one central algorithm, takes a tool built to handle that structure specifically, not a workaround.
The same is true for tracking profiles. If someone tags your product in a photo without using your campaign hashtag, you should still catch it. A listening tool that only searches for exact tags will miss them entirely.
A listening tool accesses a lot of public data. This means that privacy and moderation are part of the same conversation, not two separate ones. Before content from a tracked hashtag is published, it needs to be checked by a moderator. This helps to catch spam and anything that is not appropriate before it is seen by an audience or on a company website.
It’s also a good idea to check where your data is actually processed. Walls.io is hosted in the EU and complies with the GDPR, which is important if your legal or IT team needs to approve any tracking tool that your brand uses on social media.
Social listening tools have gone from being nice to have to something most marketing teams now think they’ll need for their next hashtag campaign. The part that’s important to get right isn’t the dashboard.
Monitoring your brand tags is more important than you think
FAQs
A social listening tool is a software that allows you to monitor hashtag content on social media. It helps businesses and organizations collect all the public content around a marketing campaign or event.
Hashtag walls such as Walls.io are among the best social listening tools, since they enable you to collect content published with specific hashtags or keywords across multiple social media platforms. These tools go beyond basic tracking – if you’re running a hashtag campaign and would love to give everyone a chance to share their thoughts or photos, you can use Direct Posts and other interactive features.