Discover Trends with Social Listening

What is Social Listening?

Social Listening is a research workspace within the Social Planner that gathers trending signals from multiple public sources. It helps you understand what people are searching, watching, pinning, and discussing—enabling you to transform real-time interests into timely posts and campaigns.

This feature centralizes trend discovery from various platforms and presents each source with its own metrics and context. It integrates seamlessly with your existing planning tools, allowing you to move directly from an insight to a scheduled post.

Key Benefits of Social Listening

These advantages focus on planning smarter, faster content backed by real data rather than guesswork:

• First-mover advantage: Identify rising topics before they peak to capture greater reach.
• Audience alignment: Match campaigns to the exact keywords, songs, and hashtags people are engaging with.
• Data-backed decisions: Replace guesswork with verifiable trend metrics across sources.
• Faster workflow: Discover, ideate, and schedule without needing third-party tools or additional logins.
• Clear client value: Tie strategy to live cultural signals for more effective reporting conversations.

Trend Sources Overview

Social Listening aggregates data from multiple platforms, each providing unique insights:

• Google Trends: Real-time search momentum and demand by location, showing country-specific search volumes.
• Pinterest Keywords: Visual discovery patterns and seasonal interest shifts, displaying total pins, weekly growth percentage, monthly growth percentage, yearly growth percentage, top regions, and trend score.
• Wikipedia Pageviews: Rising public awareness of topics, events, and people, showing total views for the current week, average views from the previous week, and daily and weekly view trends.
• TikTok Breakout Songs: Rapid week-over-week audio momentum, including song name and artist.
• TikTok Hashtags: Surging conversations and communities, showing hashtag, search volume, and industry context.
• TikTok Popular Songs: Evergreen audio with steady usage beyond short-lived spikes.
• YouTube Popular Channels: Creators gaining traction, useful for competitive research and collaboration ideas.
• YouTube Popular Keywords: High-interest search terms to improve video discoverability.
• YouTube Trending Videos: Fast-climbing formats and topics, showing video name, channel name, comments, author URL, and likes.

How to Use Social Listening

The Social Listening tab is available wherever Social Planner is enabled in your workspace. Follow these steps:

1. Open Social Planner and click on the Social Listening tab.
2. Choose the data source you want to analyze (e.g., hashtag, keyword, song, or channel). The selected source will be highlighted, and you can scroll through the full list to view detailed insights.
3. Apply date filters to focus on a specific time range and track trends for the selected dates.

Note: Clicking a trend card opens the source website in a new tab to explore the original chart or dataset. Changes made on the external site do not affect your CRM data.

Use Cases

Practical scenarios to turn Social Listening insights into action:

• Weekly content planning: Build a 7–14 day calendar by pulling high-signal topics from multiple sources. Draft posts immediately while momentum is high.
• Localized campaigns: Compare regions to tailor copy, visuals, and offers per market, prioritizing areas with higher search or engagement.
• YouTube discovery to script drafting: Use popular keywords to outline hooks and titles, then study trending videos for pacing and format cues.
• Seasonal and event content: Combine seasonal growth data with awareness trends to time education posts, checklists, or buying guides.
• Thought leadership and explainers: Validate rising concepts to publish timely explainers, FAQs, or carousel threads that meet demand.
• Creator and competitor research: Track popular channels to map collaboration prospects and identify topics to cover or differentiate from.

Best Practices

Actionable guidance to improve signal quality, speed to publish, and long-term performance:

• Triangulate trends: Validate ideas across at least two sources before committing resources.
• Mind the half-life: Trends decay quickly! Aim to draft and schedule within 24–72 hours of detection when appropriate.
• Add context and credits: Note the originating source in your post brief to maintain transparency.