Guide to Social Listening on TikTok

Social listening on TikTok helps brands tap into fast-moving, highly visual conversations fueled by trends, sounds, and creativity. With millions of users sharing opinions, reactions, and experiences through short-form videos every day, TikTok is a powerful platform for tracking sentiment, spotting cultural moments, and staying ahead of what’s trending. 

SurveySparrow’s social listening on TikTok lets you monitor specific hashtags, keywords, and creator content, enabling you to stay informed, responsive, and connected to what your audience cares about most.

Let’s look at an example to understand.

SS Group, a hotel chain, noticed that while post-stay surveys showed high satisfaction, TikTok users were posting videos highlighting a different side of the guest experience. Some clips praised the aesthetic rooms and views, while others pointed out small gaps like slow check-ins, noisy hallways, or missing amenities, tagged with brand hashtags like #sshotelreview, #expectationvsreality, and #sstravelwithme and keywords like slow check-in at SS Hotel", "SS hotel missing amenities. 

These videos often went viral, with viewers weighing in on their own stays or asking for recommendations, shaping public perception in real time.

In such cases, Social Listening on TikTok helps you understand the full guest experience beyond surveys, by tracking hashtags, trends, and creator content. This allows you to spot experience gaps, amplify positive moments, and stay connected to what customers really think and feel.

Let’s see how to set up your account and start listening on TikTok.

1. Create a new listening feed.
   
2. Give a name for the listening feed .
3. Under Choose Platforms, select TikTok 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 #hotelreview, #expectationvsreality, and #travelwithme, keywords such as "slow check-in", "missing amenities", and "looked better in photos", and relevant @mentions of the brand’s handle to capture real guest experiences while excluding unrelated terms like #ad, #traveldeals, or keywords like "promo code", "flight discount", and "travel influencer tips" to keep the results focused and actionable.
   

5. You can also use Wing AI to build the query.

6. Once done, go to Preview Feed.

7.  You’ll be able to view all posts related to the specifics you selected.

8. Click on Save Feed, Start Listening.

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


10. On each post, you can:

• Click the three dots (⋮) to open the post directly on TikTok or copy its link.
  
• Understand engagements by viewing every mention of the selected hashtags, keywords, and @tags. Each mention can also be opened on TikTok or copied via a direct link.
  

11. 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 TikTok to monitor real-time public conversations about your brand or topics of interest.
• Social listening using TikTok can't be done in countries where the app is banned, since content from the platform isn’t available in those regions.