Use Cases of Social Listening for Consumer Brands in 2025

Use Cases of Social Listening for Consumer Brands in 2025

Consumer brands have to focus on their product quality to survive in the market–100% valid. But there are three other factors they need to fight to survive in the market: brand perception, customer engagement, and real-time responsiveness. These factors underscore the importance of knowing what is a use case of social listening in 2025. 

Are you a consumer brand trying to figure out what customers think of you? If yes, you are in the right place. Understanding social listening and its use cases substantially improves how you approach your customers. So without any further ado, let’s dive into detail about some important use case examples.

What is Social Listening, and Why Does It Matter?

Social Listening refers to the process of understanding customer sentiment and trends on a deeper level. Let’s say you run a bookstore and need to order books for the next month and you have a variety of genres. What do you choose? Fiction or Nonfiction? Biographies or True Crime? Your choice depends on what customers prefer or what the customer trend is. Just checking one or two comments on Instagram isn’t enough to be aware of that. You need to go through a variety of channels to properly grasp your customer sentiment and that’s what consumer brands can leverage social listening for. 

‍

Key Use Cases for Consumer Brands

So what is a use case?  A use case is one of the possible ways a user can interact with a product or a service. That’s enough theory for a day. Now, let’s look at some use cases for social listening:

1. Brand Reputation Management

Consumer brands need to stay on their toes regarding what their target audience is saying on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms about their services. Social listening ensures vigilance and quick responses from consumer brands to feedback.  

The best example of this use case is Nike. They have separate handles dedicated to customer support across various platforms so that customers don’t feel left out and get immediate fixes. Yes, a brand like Nike does that. It’s a no-brainer that it has managed to stay in the game for so long. Social listening enhances and automates this proactive approach to consumer complaints or problems, which improves brand reputation. 

2. Crisis Detection and Management

Another use case could be to detect negative sentiments early and solve the issue before it blows out of proportion. 

For instance, Chick-fil-A introduced a new Smokehouse BBQ sauce replacing its popular original BBQ sauce. Customers went berserk over this. The consumer brand used social listening to identify that fan sentiment dropped to a negative 73%. However, leveraging this, they came up with a campaign strategy around the hashtag - #BroughtBackTheBBQ. The result? Chick-fil-A saw a 188x increase in brand mentions on social media and fan sentiment to 92% positive.   

The moral of the story? Never replace originals. 

3. Understanding Consumer Preferences and Market Trends

One of the best use case examples of social listening is consumer brands trying to gauge the ever-evolving preferences of customers. You have to identify customer pain points before investing in any kind of new product or service. It doesn’t matter how creative you are. If customers don’t buy, your project will be a failure. To learn this use, there is no better example than Netflix. 

Netflix won the Shorty Awards for the creative use of technology. Their innovation–a pair of socks. That’s right! Netflix, through social listening, identified that its users fall asleep while watching a show only to wake up many episodes later. So, Netflix introduced Netflix Socks. This pair of smart socks could sense when a user is falling asleep, sending a signal to the device to pause the show. The project was successful and was able to gain customer trust for catering to their needs. 

4. Competitive Analysis and Benchmarking

Social listening can also help in tracking competitor movement. You can always learn from how your rival brands are interacting with consumers or handling crises and adapt your strategies. Consumer brands do this all the time. We all must have noticed the constant “banter” between PepsiCo and Coca-Cola happening in their campaigns. 

Coca-Cola had introduced the “Share a Coke” campaign, which encompassed writing customer names on Coke bottles. With their social listening, PepsiCo identified that Coca-Cola was creating massive buzz with their campaign, which led them to understand that customers are big on personalization. 

In response to Coca-Cola’s initiative, PepsiCo introduced “Pepsi Emoji Bottles.” The campaign used globally familiar emojis instead of names, making it more inclusive and thus impressing consumers. And PepsiCo pulled off this campaign by leveraging insights from Coca-Cola’s initiative–all thanks to social listening. PepsiCo’s use case should be a big lesson for consumer brands trying to outperform their rivals. 

5. Influencer and Brand Advocacy Management

For the last use case of social listening, we have influencer and brand advocacy management. Although not quite common, it’s an important one for consumer brands utilizing social listening, especially in today’s digital age where influencer marketing is very popular. 

What is a use case for influencer and brand advocacy? Let’s take a look at the example of Adidas. The Adidas UltraBoost Campaign needed faces for its marketing. Faces that resonate with its brand and its audience. Leveraging insights from social listening, Adidas identified fitness influencers and athletes that fit the description. As a plus, these influencers and athletes were already fans of the shoe. Adidas then featured its content in its campaign making it more relatable to its audience. 

These key use case examples could help brands change the way they perceive their customers and how they shape their marketing efforts. 

‍

The Future of Social Listening for Consumer Brands

If you’re still wondering why social listening is important for consumer brands, let’s summarize what it does for you - 

1. Track consumer sentiment about your brand across multiple online platforms
2.  Analyze current trends and adapt marketing efforts accordingly
3. Prepare an industry benchmark for your brand to achieve
4. Help improve customer engagement by being spontaneous with responses

But what is the future of social listening? It goes without saying that with automation everywhere, AI tools are at the helm of all marketing strategies. It's no surprise that AI is the future of social listening. Consumer brands need to upgrade their efforts by incorporating AI-powered tools in their social listening efforts. The use cases above have already shown us the significance of understanding and responding well to customer sentiment. Not even big brands can escape. These examples further have an implication that automation can take social listening to a whole new level. 

Confused about which tool is for you? The answer to that depends on your KPIs, financial constraints, and so on. Some popular recommendations include Mention, Agorapulse, DeepDive, and Brandwatch. 

‍

Conclusion

Understanding what is a use case of social listening in 2025 is very important. We are experiencing a tectonic shift in marketing. Standards have gone high and AI is dominating everything. The use cases we have discussed have shown that no brand can escape the importance of social listening. 

The examples of Nike or Netflix should be followed by all the consumer brands out there. So, don’t miss your shot being indecisive. Take action and start your brand’s social listening journey today. 

Don’t know where to begin? We can help you. Reach out and stay tuned for more updates on social listening and other marketing stuff.