Small Business Takeaway:
- Social listening tools help businesses understand customer conversations in real time, spot emerging trends faster, and respond to opportunities or concerns quickly. Companies using these tools report higher ROI and can make data-driven decisions about marketing, product development, and customer engagement that would otherwise take weeks to uncover. This isn't just for enterprise brands—small businesses can start with free tools and simple monitoring strategies.
Companies including Neuro, Unilever, and Crayola have all driven results from insights gleaned from high-tech analyses of social media conversations.
That’s because artificial intelligence–driven analytics are enabling businesses to spot trends and respond to consumers concerns more quickly and with more nuance than ever before.
Accelerated response times are what the market calls for today. “The media cycle is speeding up, so the problem is that you have more volume of media, it’s all fragmented in a million places, and the narrative in it moves very quickly,” said Chris Hackney, Chief Product Officer at Meltwater, which provides social media analytics and other data-driven tools to businesses.
Brands need to stay on top these narratives both because they can provide opportunities for boosting a brand’s engagement with consumers and because negative and potentially damaging content could be spreading, he explained.
“AI gives you the tools you need to be successful in that environment, and that’s particularly important in social media, where you have a lot of conversations happening in real time,” said Hackney.
Determining if ‘a conversation around your brand is positive, negative or sarcastic’
Most Meltwater clients are using the company’s tools primarily for the detection of patterns and the sentiments expressed in those patterns, he said. The company’s AI tools also help brands identify key influencers driving specific trends on social media.
“Determining the sentiment of [online] conversations has always been a challenge, but AI helps us delineate that much quicker and much more effectively, so we can understand whether a conversation around your brand is positive, negative or sarcastic,” said Hackney.
About a quarter—27%—of social media marketing professionals surveyed by Hootsuite said they switch up their content based on memes and trends, according to the company’s 2025 Social Media Trends report. In addition, the survey found that brands that employ social listening tools reported higher confidence in their return on investment across all nine social media channels studied.
For example, 76% of social media marketers who use social listening tools on Instagram said they were confident that their engagement on the platform was delivering an ROI, versus 63% of those who were not using social listening tools.
“The information that social listening provides is valuable in two ways,” the Hootsuite report concluded. “It helps social teams deliver meaningful brand, customer and competitor insights to the rest of their organization, and it equips them to track hard numbers that prove their return on investment.”
[Read more: How Brands Both Big and Small Are Tapping Reddit to Drive Business]
Our old workflow meant it could take days to process what was going viral. We needed a solution that let us act in real time.Brittany Mehalick, Social Media Engagement and Trends Manager at Crayola
Neuro chewing gum: Targeting online gamers with Instagram giveaways and other viral promotions yields 406% sales lift
Neuro, which makes functional chewing gum and mints, uses social listening tools from Meltwater to analyze the market and surface data to inform their go-to-market strategies.
Using AI, Neuro analyzed its audience based on opportunity, size, and relevance to the energy nutrition category, which refers to consumer products designed to provide energy-boosting, nutritive value, and discovered that online game players were a significant target audience. As a result, the brand partnered with 100 Thieves, a company that makes apparel and other products for esports gamers.
The partnership, which included giveaways on Instagram and other efforts, went viral on social media, generating 4.6 million impressions across 30 social media posts. Neuro garnered more than a billion impressions and recorded a 406% year-over-year sales lift.
“We had a theory that the gaming audience was low-hanging fruit for us, but we wanted to really validate it with concrete data,” Jennifer Chang, VP of Commercial and Head of Marketing at Neuro, said in a Meltwater case study.
The success reflects the ability of AI to unlock data analysis at scale, which otherwise would take a full team of analysts weeks or months, the company said.
Unilever uses social listening to make Vaseline cool with the Gen Z crowd
CPG giant Unilever, the parent of brands that include Dove, Axe, Hellmann’s, and Vaseline, has begun applying AI tools to its social media listening. In recent months, it has leveraged the information it has gathered in this way to create an award-winning social media marketing effort and even launch a top-selling new product.
In monitoring social media mentions of various uses that consumers have found for its Vaseline petroleum gel, which consumers had been tagging using the #VaselineHacks hashtag, Unilever was able to piggyback on these posts with an official #VaselineVerified hashtag of its own.
“The campaign has disrupted the social landscape, reshaping how Gen Z sees it, uses it and talks about it,” the company said in an online post about its latest AI initiatives.
The campaign was recognized with the Titanium award at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity.
[Read more: AI Is Revolutionizing Product Returns — And Every Business Can Benefit]
Crayola: Real-time social listening helps brand jump on emerging trends 90% faster
Crayola, the maker of crayons and other artistic supplies and toys, has stepped up its social media listening by partnering with Emplifi, a provider of customer experience solutions powered by AI, including social listening.
Crayola engages with its followers on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and X, but it wanted to be able to respond to comments and identify trends more quickly, said Brittany Mehalick, Social Media Engagement and Trends Manager at Crayola, in an Emplifi case study.
“Our old workflow meant it could take days to process what was going viral. We needed a solution that let us act in real time,” she said.
The company was able to leverage its social listening skills as part of a 2025 marketing campaign promoting the return of eight crayon colors that had previously been retired. Each of the colors—Dandelion, Blizzard Blue, Magic Mint, Mulberry, Orange Red, Violet Blue, Lemon Yellow, and Raw Umber—had its own personality for the campaign.
The company developed a social listening strategy in which it responded to mentions of the brand with an image of one of the resurrected colors and using the personality of that color.
“That really allowed us to have a fun way to engage with consumers,” said Mehalick.
Crayola was able to process content 80% faster using an Emplifi solution, according to the case study, and was able to detect and respond to emerging trends 90% faster.
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