Guide to Social Listening on Twitter

Social listening on X helps brands tap into real-time, high-velocity conversations across a wide range of topics. With millions of users sharing opinions, experiences, and feedback every day through tweets, threads, and replies, X is a valuable platform for tracking public sentiment, identifying emerging trends, and engaging with your audience in the moment. SurveySparrow’s social listening on X lets you monitor specific keywords, hashtags, and @tags, enabling you to stay informed, responsive, and in tune with what truly matters to your customers.

Let’s look at an example to understand. 

A food delivery brand noticed that while formal feedback channels showed stable satisfaction, users on X (formerly Twitter) had begun tweeting about delayed orders, tagging the brand and using hashtags like #latenightdeliveryfail and #stillwaiting. These real-time complaints often included screenshots of app glitches or delivery delays in specific cities.

Unlike traditional feedback tools, X gave the brand access to immediate, unfiltered reactions from customers—shared publicly and often amplified through retweets.

In such cases, Social Listening on X enables you to track relevant keywords, hashtags, and @tags, allowing you to monitor fast-moving conversations and understand real-time sentiment. This helps you catch issues early, identify location-specific trends, and respond promptly—ultimately improving the customer experience and protecting your brand reputation.

Let’s see how to set up your account and listen on X.

1. Create a new listening feed.
2. Give a name for the listening feed .
3. Under Choose Platforms, select X and click Continue.
4. The next step is to build your query.
   In this step, you’ll be able to customize your listening feed by selecting specific hashtags, keywords, and @tags to include or exclude, helping you focus on the most relevant conversations.
   Note: You can use the "Add Group" to create separate groups for hashtags, keywords, or user tags in your inclusions and exclusions while building your query. This helps organize and refine your listening feed for more precise results.

In our example, we have included hashtags like #latenightdeliveryfail and #stillwaiting, keywords such as "delivery delay" and "app not working", and relevant @mentions of the brand’s handle to capture real-time user feedback—while excluding unrelated terms like #foodpics or "promo code" to keep the results focused and actionable.

You can also use Wing AI to build the query.

5. Once done, go to Preview Feed.
   
   
   6.  You’ll be able to view all posts related to the specifics you selected.

7.  Click on Save Feed, Start Listening.

8. This will take you to the Mentions page, where all your created social feeds are displayed.

On each post, you can:

• Click the three dots (⋮) to open the post directly on X or copy its link.
  
• Understand engagements by viewing every mention of the selected hashtags, keywords, and @tags. Each mention can also be opened on X or copied via a direct link.
  
  9. You also have access to an Overview Dashboard, which provides a comprehensive summary of your listening feed's performance. It brings together key insights such as mention volume over time, daily sentiment trends, spikes in conversation, engagement breakdowns, and the most-used keywords and hashtags. This dashboard helps you quickly identify shifts in public perception, uncover emerging topics, and spot potential issues or opportunities at a glance.
  
  
  For a more detailed explanation of each chart and metric, refer to the section on Interpreting Social Listening Dashboard help article.
  
  Note:
• You can track hashtags, keywords, and @mentions on X to monitor real-time public conversations about your brand or topics of interest.
  
  
• The @tags must match the exact Twitter handle (e.g., @BrandSupport) to be captured accurately. Misspellings or indirect mentions won't be tracked unless included as keywords.