The world of social media is vast and full of potentially useful conversations for brands.

On social media, consumers often freely offer what amount to reviews, product insights, and even content marketing for the brands that they purchase from. The only catch is that brands don’t know exactly where these conversations are taking place.

Enter social listening. Social listening tools, sometimes called social monitoring tools, scan social networks (and often other related sites like blogs and forums) for a keyword or key phrase. This could be a hashtag, a brand name, a competitor’s name, or anything relevant to a marketing campaign.

Many social listening tools also have the ability to monitor for sentiment (negative, positive, or neutral) in the mentions of a word or phrase, and can also pull out actionable insights such as major topics and key influencers.

There is a wide range of social listening tools, from free to paid to enterprise solutions, that can allow brands to better understand their audience, their reputation and their products through social conversations.

I met with Amy Vetter, Senior European Digital Insights Manager at Samsung, and Justin Khaksar, Managing Director and Senior Vice President, EMEA & APAC at Crimson Hexagon, to learn how Samsung in Europe uses Crimson Hexagon’s AI-powered audience insights platform to understand what its customers – and would-be customers – are saying on social media, and fine-tune its approach to product marketing.