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What is keyword listening?

Keyword listening means watching public conversations for specific words and phrases, and being told when someone uses them. Instead of searching each site yourself, you write down what you care about once and the matches come to you.

It is the simplest form of social listening. There are no sentiment scores or share-of-voice charts, just a list of phrases and the posts that contain them.

Keyword listening in four steps: keywords, sources, a rule, and an alert

What people use it for

  • Brand monitoring See when someone mentions your product, including misspellings
  • Competitor tracking See when people praise, compare, or complain about a competitor
  • Buying signals Catch people asking which vendor to pick
  • Support Find complaints that never reached your help desk

How it works

  1. Choose your keywords. These are the phrases that would make you want to read a post.
  2. Choose your sources. Go where your buyers talk. For most B2B products, that means Reddit and X, and often LinkedIn.
  3. Set a rule. A rule decides which matches are worth an alert, so routine mentions stay quiet.
  4. Read the alerts. Each one should include enough context to act on: who said it, what they said, and a link to the original.

Keyword listening on each source

Each source rewards a slightly different approach.

On Reddit, people ask long, specific questions and compare vendors in detail. Reddit listening tools watch every subreddit so you can reply while a thread is still open.

On X, posts are short and move quickly, so the words you pick matter more. Twitter keyword listening depends on tight phrases and good filters.

LinkedIn has no native keyword alert, and it is where trigger events show up: role changes, funding posts, hiring sprees, and competitor announcements. LinkedIn monitoring is coming soon here.

How to start

Pick five keywords: your brand, one competitor, and three phrases a buyer would use to describe the problem you solve. Watch them for a week. Then cut whatever brought noise and add the phrases you saw in the posts worth reading.

You can do this by hand with bookmarked searches, or use a keyword listening tool to check every source for you and send you the matches.

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