Listening 101

Share of voice: how to calculate it, and what it misses

Share of voice gets reported as one clean percentage, but it's built from a count that's easy to skew and it changes meaning depending on what's being counted. Here's the formula, a worked example, and the two failure modes worth checking before you trust the number.

What a listening dashboard should actually show you

Most social listening dashboards open with more widgets than anyone needs. Here's the short list of numbers that earn a place on the front screen, in what order, and why the rest can wait for a click.

How social media sentiment analysis works, and where it fails

A dashboard says sentiment is comfortably positive this week. Here's what produces that number, and the specific ways it gets fooled, from sarcasm to a negative word buried in an otherwise glowing post.

How brand mention tools work: the pipeline behind the dashboard

You open a listening dashboard and see "sentiment up 8%" or "312 new mentions this week." Here's what actually happens between someone posting online and that number showing up: how social listening tools collect, clean, score and deliver the conversation.

What is social listening? A plain-English guide for 2026

Social listening sounds like enterprise jargon, but the idea is simple: know what the internet is saying about the things you care about. Here's how it works: the platforms, the features and the workflow, and how to start for free.