How to Use Social Listening for Influencer Marketing in 2025?

Have you ever wondered how some brands seem to know exactly what their customers are thinking? Or how they manage to respond so quickly to trends and feedback? The secret might be simpler than you think.

Picture this: You want to capture all the positive reviews, insider tips, opinions, and crucial information for the growth of your brand.

So, you get into social media scrolling. Hours pass, and you've only managed to gather 10 mentions of your brand. Frustrating, isn't it?

We've been there too. Spending countless hours on manual scrolling is not only exhausting but often yields mediocre results. That's why we turned to a game-changing solution: social listening.

Imagine having a tool that automates this entire process, gathering metrics and mentions effortlessly. It's not just a time-saver; it's a complete transformation of how you understand and interact with your audience.

In this article, we’ll help you understand the use of social listening to build a successful brand advocate program and how to analyze sentiments to make your brand a customer-pleaser!

Using social listening tools for influencer discovery

Brand advocates or social media influencers are people who promote your brand with their reviews, testimonials, photos, and videos without any direct compensation. They have genuine appreciation for your brand.

Benefits of using social listening tools to track brand mentions

54% of social media users agree to buy a product or service after seeing its mention on Instagram. By simply existing on Instagram, brands get a halo effect and stay one step ahead of competitors who lack a social presence.

A survey done by Meta states:

• 83% of people use Instagram to discover new products and services
• 80% decide whether to buy a product or service from online mentions
• 81% use it to research products and services

With a social listening tool, you can amplify your mentions, discover influencers with an interest in your brand, and recruit them to achieve awareness, engagement, and drive sales.

Some benefits of using these tools include:

• Saves time: Suppose you have 2000 influencer profiles from your search tool. Now, you can sort them manually, or do it within minutes by using a social listening tool. You can filter these profiles with specific keywords, to concentrate on mentions of certain features too. For example, if you search with the keyword “Korea”, a social listening tool will result in the following posts:

• Crisis management: Social listening tools help track customer sentiments and change in their voice for your brand. This is a good way to gear up your risk management system and fix issues that your customers might face.

• Competitor and industry trends: The conversations about your industry on social media can help you identify gaps and take the first mover advantage on opportunities. Take this friendly between McDonalds and Wendy’s for an example.

These kinds of trends and friendly online banter will help you spot opportunities to pursue and threats to avoid.

Filtering media mentions

Product feedback comes in many forms, impressions, engagement, saves, media posts, followers, etc. To create an impact, sort these mentions into different categories and analyze customer sentiment based on their action.

• Impressions: This is the number of times a content is seen, which can also be multiple times from a single user. If a person is viewing your brand-related content multiple times they’re hooked!

• Engagement: This covers how people interact with your posts. It includes saves, likes, forwards, favorites, collections, etc.

• Followers: Analyze if customers want to stay updated about your brand by looking at the follower count. For example, if your follower count spikes from 1,000 to 2,000 after an influencer mentions your brand, they have a positive impact on your consumers. Consider making them your ambassadors or affiliates to leverage their growth potential.

• Identify potential influencers and brand advocates: The more social media proof you get, the better for your sales. Choose influencers with genuine profiles and a positive attitude towards your brand. They are your online spokesperson, and their words can make or break your reputation. For example, Indian fashion brand Meesho hired influencer Nancy Tyagi after she gained attention at the Cannes Festival for her exceptional fashion sense and fashion design skills.

Thus, you can analyze the potential influencers with social listening and get your brand, the publicity it deserves.

To find these positive mentions, you’ll need a social listening tool like MightyScout. With its social listening feature, track who talks about the brand, how people talk about your brand, and when sales spike because of brand mentions.

You’ll get a notification every time your brand is mentioned, so you can scout the influencer, and also repost the content to reach more customers.

With this feature, you can track a specific influencer and find the daily average number of mentions. This snippet shows influencer posts, community posts, total posts, and daily engagements. You don’t need to visit any profile manually; just check this tab for all the information.

Additionally, you can also track media mentions with email alerts. As a brand or an agency, you can update clients about their brand and be up to date.

Analyzing user-generated content (UGC)

1. Get insights

Rather than using traditional advertising methods, listen to your customers and create content they relate with.

When a customer shows loyalty and consistency with your brand, reward them for demonstrating that you care about their needs, not just making a profit.

Take inspiration from brands like Miu Miu. During the Miu Miu Autumn Winter 2024 fashion show, 70-year-old Qin Huilan, a doctor turned social media style influencer from Shanghai, China, walked the runway. She has been a loyal customer of the brand for years, and they decided to invite Ms. Huilan as a model to showcase their appreciation for a customer.

2. Monitoring feedback and commentary on new product launches

Understand whether your products/services are underperforming or creating a buzz among customers (negative or positive). By tracking UGC program insights at the brand, product, and category levels, you can quickly identify areas of opportunity and prioritize accordingly.

If you’re about to launch a new product monitor reviews, hauls, or ratings that appear on social media right after the launch. These give you an insider's view of your customers' first impressions and room for improvement.

This example of a Crumbl cookie review devoted page is excellent for getting these kinds of insights:

The customer is not in any way affiliated with Crumbl but makes it a point to try out every cookie by the brand and rate them based on presentation, texture, taste, and overall experience. It’s a selfless act by a customer that the company can capture and hire for the influencer or affiliate program. They can also provide discounts or coupon codes for every cookie the customer buys!

To get these kinds of insights, you can use MightScout to create custom metrics, track beyond impressions, and follow your framework.

“Our Custom Metrics feature allows for more personalized reports. Tell our team how you regularly report on metrics and we'll add custom formulas to help augment the data that is displayed on your reports. This means you can automatically calculate key figures such as estimated impressions or media value according to your agency's unique reporting standards, consistently across all campaigns.”

3. Using UGC to understand customer sentiment and preferences

UGC content tells you:

• Real impact of the product
• Story behind the brand and why people love or hate it
• Debunk the myths

For example, the customer of a famous sneaker brand Comet explains why their popularity has increased recently and what makes the product unique. This helps viewers understand the product better and persuades them to try it too.

Engaging with brand advocates

1. Identify die-hard fans

To identify die-hard fans, the first step is to find how often they post about your brand.

For example,

This customer posts a lot of hauls from the same brand, they can enlist her as one of the influencers in their brand. Then create lookalike profiles on MightyScout or other similar tools to find more influencers in the same category.

MightyScout offers a 30-day money-back guarantee with no contract requirements, making it a low-risk option for brands to try out. They also provide an enterprise plan for larger, customized needs.

Once you identify these brand advocates, you need to cluster them into one profile and start your outreach for the next step—recruiting them.

2. Strategies for recruiting brand advocates as influencers

A brand advocate is a user who loves to talk about your brand extensively on social media. Their genuine appreciation for your products wins the hearts of the audience and drives more profits and social proof for your brand.

Some strategies, you can use to recruit them as influencers are:

• Celebrate their social media mentions with a shoutout: There’s nothing a customer loves more than being featured on their favorite brand’s social media pages. If you want to recruit them and win their trust, repost their story across social media channels like X, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and more.

For example, This brand showcases customers wearing their outfits through the "UR Looks" story highlights on their profiles.

• Provide coupon codes: Give customers coupon codes in exchange for posting a story or post about your brand. This piques the interest of new customers and shows your attention to existing customers by involving them in your brand. You can put a story announcing that “First 5 customers with a creative post about our new product get 10% off on next 3 purchases.”

• Start a referral program: You can recruit more loyal customers via brand advocates by starting a referral program. In a referral program, you can reward the customers with reward points or store credit to use on the next purchase.

3. Integrating brand advocates into your influencer marketing playbook

Adding brand advocates to your overall influencer marketing strategy can bring you positive results—provided it’s done strategically.

Let’s check out how you can do that:

• Social media strategies: The organic shares and saves from your UGC expand your reach and help you create strategies for acquiring more customers. You can analyze brand advocates’ content to find inspiration and guide influencers.
• Content marketing: Share relatable content from brand advocates via social listening within 24 hours of their post. This approach grabs more attention and highlights your brand effectively and immediately.
• Public relations: Good PR is the bread and butter of any brand. Brand advocates help add authenticity to your brand’s image, and ensure your target audience of your genuine efforts and claims with the brand.
• Employee advocacy: Encourage your employees to showcase the positive side of your brand by going live on social media, creating reels, and sharing behind-the-scenes content to make your brand look fun and engaging to customers.

Structuring a brand advocate program

Offering incentives and rewards

Extra rewards and incentives are like a magnet for your brand advocates. When your true customers go online, motivate them to post more about your brand with an added benefit.

Some ways you can offer them incentives and rewards are:

• Coupons

• Features

In this way, you can reward brand advocates and give them a chance to feel special to be a part of your brand’s mission and vision.

2. Providing products or exclusive access to brand advocates

Suppose you already have an influencer program or affiliate program. In that case, social listening can be your way to find more influencers who’ve already identified themselves as brand fans by posting content for you.

Since these brand advocates don’t expect anything in return when posting for the first time, they’ve already gone to your product seeding stage. So, they're farther ahead in the influencer discovery process than a random influencer who has been identified for outreach.

So, this works alongside product seeding as another method of finding more influencers and building the affiliate program.

You can further incentivize them by providing free products or early access.

When you give early access and rewards, you’ll see more and more customers signing in as an incentive, in this way, you can also get their emails to apprise them about offers and product launches.

3. Requesting permission to reuse user-generated content in paid advertising

Yes, they talked about your brand in one of their posts, but you still need their permission before you use that content piece in any of your paid campaigns.

Here’s a simple message you can use to ask for permission from the users:

Hi [User's Name],

We love your recent post featuring [mention the product, service, or brand]! We would like to share it on our Instagram account to showcase how our customers are enjoying [product/service].

Would you mind if we repost your photo/video on our profile and use it for our ad campaigns? We will make sure to give you full credit by tagging your account.

Please reply with #Yes[YourBrandName] if you’re happy for us to share it. Thank you for being such an awesome part of our community!

Best,

[Your Name] [Your Position] [Your Brand]

Primarily, getting permission strengthens content security by ensuring compliance with legal frameworks and protecting against copyright or ownership disputes. It also provides direct access to UGC, allowing brands to leverage authentic user content in their campaigns effectively.

Once you get this permission, you can use UGC for paid ads on your mixed channels and website to showcase real-life experiences and build credibility.

Once you get this permission, you can use UGC for paid ads on your mixed channels and website to showcase real-life experiences and build credibility.

Measuring the success of brand advocate campaigns

1. Key performance indicators (KPIs) for brand advocate campaigns

Some essentials to analyze a good brand advocate program include:

• Advocate engagement rate: Measure how actively brand advocates participate in the program by tracking their interactions, content creation, and participation in brand activities.
• Deliverables: Check the quality and impressions on posts and stories put out by your advocates to check their impact.
• Referral traffic: Track the amount of website traffic or app downloads driven by advocate referrals.
• Conversion rates: Measure the percentage of referred users who complete desired actions, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter.
• Brand mentions: Track the number of times brand advocates mention the brand on social media, blogs, or other platforms.
• User-generated content (UGC) adoption: Measure how much of the advocate-created content is being used in marketing campaigns and other brand communications.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): Compare the cost of acquiring new customers through the brand advocate program versus other marketing channels.
• Customer lifetime value (CLV): Measure the long-term value of customers acquired through advocate referrals compared to other acquisition methods.

A relation management software is great at tracking these insights and relieving you from the hassle of manual scrolling.

Brand advocate content vs. traditional influencer content

Before comparing both types of content, let’s see how they differ from each other:

As per these differences, you can compare the effectiveness of brand advocates and traditional influencers in terms of:

• Sales
• Cost
• Reach
• Followers
• Creativity
• Conversions
• Risks
• Consistency

Swoon your brand advocates with the best relationship management tool

Brand advocates help your brand grow and are an integral part of your strategy for gaining trust on social media.

Using a management tool makes it easy to maintain those relationships in the long term and get rid of those pesky spreadsheets. No need to fill in information manually every time for a post or new influencer. You can track stories and posts across channels within minutes with MightyScout.