Instagram Listening: The Ultimate Guide to Social Listening on Instagram

Instagram listening seems simple. Track the hashtags, see what people are talking about—that's it! Right?

If you have been doing this, you're missing out on the goldmine of opportunities leading to:

• Missed UGC opportunities
• Negative brand reputation
• No understanding of customer sentiment

If you plan to start Instagram listening for your brand, here's everything you should know.

What is Instagram Listening?

Jason Brooks, Co-founder at UK Linkology considers Instagram listening to be the track record of social conversations:

‍“Instagram listening is about keeping track of what people are saying and what's happening on Instagram that's relevant to your brand and your industry: mentions, comments, hashtags and other metadata. It's mining the platform for actionable insights to inform your marketing strategies, product development, and outreach efforts.”

Simply put, Instagram listening is the center of social conversations—it monitors and analyzes all the conversations happening among people on Instagram about your brand, product or industry. 

Through these conversations on Instagram, you can stand out from your competitors, discover UGC opportunities, create intentional, customer-centric content, and develop targeted influencer marketing campaigns. 

The Importance of Instagram Listening

While Instagram listening helps create more UGC opportunities and laser-focused marketing campaigns, there's much more it can do. 

Learning Directly from Your Audience

Whether you want to create intentional content for your target audience, understand audience demographics or launch your next ad campaign—it’s impossible to do so unless you understand:

• What your audience wants
• What are their pain points 
• What are their needs and motivations
• What are their interests

You can gain these insights when you talk to your audience or see what they discuss on social media.

If you’re a tech accessories brand, selling products like laptop stands, you can find creators (with social listening) talking about the same product. 

For example, Hope Watson, a lifestyle + productivity creator, shared an Instagram story talking about the things she likes in the laptop stand she uses. Based on these insights, you can refine your product and its value proposition and create content on Instagram highlighting the same benefits.

Enhancing Customer Service Through Immediate Response

Besides leveraging the brand’s customer support, Instagram is your audience's new customer support channel. They’ll simply comment on your post or DM you about their concerns. To make your customer service efficient, ensure your customer support agents address each query—whether on DMs or comments. If you fail to do so, it questions your brand’s credibility. 

For instance, a customer commented on one of the posts by IKEA, sharing their dissatisfaction with the brand’s delivery. So, IKEA responded to the comment and shared how they can help the dissatisfied customer—an excellent way to speed up its customer service and provide a solution. 

Harnessing User Content to Promote Your Brand

Creators love sharing about the product and their experience on Instagram—if they like it. 

Maybe they'll share a static story. Or a reel talking about what they liked. Or how they've been using the product and the results it helped them achieve. This does two things in your favor:

1. It promotes your brand
2. It showcases real user experiences
3. It builds a sense of community

Using Instagram listening, you can:

• Track the brand mentions from these creators and identify the kind of content they share + the topics they're interested in.
• Reshare their content that mentions your brand and engage with these creators—fostering a sense of community around your brand. 

For example, this skincare creator shared a reel on her Instagram account showcasing her products by a brand called Rhode. 

Key Benefits of Instagram Listening

Driving Marketing Strategy with Real-Time Data

You can monitor user conversations about your brand, products, and industry by tracking metrics like brand mentions, audience sentiment, hashtags, and engagement. This helps you understand deeper insights about your audience, such as their needs, preferences, and pain points, enabling you to create more targeted marketing campaigns. 

For example, Summer Fridays, a skincare brand, uses data-driven insights to craft visually appealing photoshoots that resonate with its audience. The brand uses the Instagram listening tool to understand what users search for in the hybrid beauty niche. Result? They found users are searching for UGC, lip balm and swatches done on arms.

The brand further used sentiment analysis to gather community feedback on product preferences and understand users’ future demands—helping it make product decisions based on the needs and desires of the community. 

Identifying and Leveraging User Trends

You can identify new trends that resonate with your audience by analysing popular hashtags, content themes, and influencer activities. This helps you create more engaging and relevant content. 

For example, if you see a surge in posts around a specific format with a particular audio, you can recreate the same content for your audience. 

Here's how an Instagram influencer creates low-effort content—one of the trends she saw in her niche. 

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Enhancing Brand Reputation and Customer Loyalty

82% of customers expect immediate problem resolution from customer service agents. That's why when you promptly address customer feedback—positive and negative—it signals to the customers that your customer support is responsive, building trust and strengthening customer relationships.

For example, if a customer has highlighted an issue related to product delivery or quality and you haven't addressed their concern, they’ll not purchase from you again. Moreover, they'll suggest to their friends not to buy from your brand, resulting in reputational damage. 

How does Instagram listening work?

Since Instagram social listening involves monitoring and analyzing listening metrics, it consists of a three-step process: 

Step 1: Set up alerts on Instagram listening tool for brand mentions, keywords and hashtags to get real-time notifications.

Step 2: Monitor competitor activity to spot gaps in their strategy, gain industry insights, and double down on them.

Step 3: Analyze sentiment in comments and Instagram posts to understand how your audience perceives your brand.

Building an Effective Instagram Listening Strategy

Now that you know how Instagram listening works, let's understand how you can create your Instagram listening strategy and optimize your future campaigns. 

Conduct Competitive Analysis

Track branded tags, mentions and popular posts from other brands in your niche. This will help you:

• Learn more about your competitors’ products: Knowing them will give you insights into their strengths and weaknesses. You can then identify the gaps in your product and improve it to stand out from the competitors. 
• Understand the competitor’s Instagram marketing strategy: Pay attention to the type of content your competitors are posting, the frequency of posts and the level of engagement each post receives. 

For example, if you're a bed linen brand, you could search for one of your competitor's branded hashtags like #thecompanystore. 

Under the hashtag, you'll see multiple posts—static image posts and reels—from the brand and Instagram influencers. However the frequency of posts from the brand is less and more from the creators. So, you can analyze their strategy: leveraging influencers to promote their products. Based on this analysis, you can create your marketing strategy from scratch or refine it to meet your goals. 

Uncover Product Improvement Opportunities

Getting feedback from your customers is a great way to identify the strengths and gaps in your product (and improve it). Here's how to do so on Instagram:

• Check your last 10-15 Instagram posts. Have your customers commented on any of these posts mentioning your product?
• Check Instagram DMs. Has anyone reached out to you on DMs asking a specific question—positive or negative—about your product or their buying experience?
• Ask on IG stories. Have you used the questions feature in your stories and asked your audience what they liked about your product?
• Track the brand mentions from creators. Has a creator mentioned you on their Instagram story in the comments or shared a video review about your product?

For example, Brooklinen, a premium bedding brand, actively shares content on its Instagram account. In one of the reels, a customer commented and shared dissatisfaction with their product. 

Engage Customers Along Their Purchase Journey

Once you have done the competitor analysis and identified gaps in your product, the next step is to guide the customers through different touchpoints in their buying journey. 

This includes creating content that hammers the audience’s pain points, provides the right solution, and guides them by addressing their objections. 

Identify Customer’s Pain Points

Integrate social listening tools and track keywords and hashtags to understand the pain points, frustrations and questions they're asking.  

For example, if you're a skincare brand that wants to sell to people suffering from acne, use Phyllo and add keywords like acne-prone and sensitive skin. You'll then be able to listen to all the conversations happening on Instagram around these topics and create content based on the audience’s pain points.

Nurture Customer Relationships

Respond to comments, reviews and DMs—positive or negative—to build a deeper connection with them. Even if potential customers have asked questions on a reel or post shared by your creator, respond to them. To do this, use Instagram listening tools and set up alerts for brand mentions. 

For example, this creator posted a video on productivity and used #ClickUp, to which ClickUp commented and engaged with their reel. 

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Provide Stellar Customer Support 

Did the customer raise any complaints via comments or through DMs? Track hashtags, keywords and brand mentions—and respond to all the queries received from customers. 

This way, you're addressing all their objections and helping them decide whether they would purchase your product. 

For example, a follower asked ClickUp if they had updated their website with product tutorials for new content. To this, ClickUp’s team responded. This shows that the brand wants to address the customers’ questions, making product learning seamless. 

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Discover Industry Trends Relevant to Your Followers

Use hashtags and keywords to find popular topics and emerging trends to double down on them. 

• Track industry-specific hashtags: Set alerts for niche-specific keywords and hashtags in your Instagram listening tool. This helps you identify trending topics, content themes, and public discussions on those keywords, develop ideas and create trending content.
• Monitor competitor activity: Analyze how your competitors have engaged with their customers—what content formats and topics they've been posting? Doing so, you'll be able to uncover trending content and how they've been using the trends for their audience. 
• Leverage influencer insights: Pick a few niche influencers in your industry and study them. Understand the topics, formats and messaging they use to drive engagement.

Monitor Sentiments and Maintaining Customer Satisfaction

Within your Instagram listening tool, leverage the sentiment analysis feature to gauge your audience. Analyze the sentiment around your Instagram content to optimize your messaging and campaigns to resonate with your audience. To do this:

• Address positive and negative feedback on Instagram posts and DMs. 
• Measure brand health to track metrics like brand mentions, share of voice, etc. 

Tools and Techniques for Effective Listening

Wondering what listening tools you can use to double down on Instagram listening? Here are three tools to start with:

Phyllo

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Phyllo is an influencer marketing platform that enables social listening on Instagram and helps brands collect Instagram data points, track hashtags and brand mentions, and drill down on reporting and analytics. 

Key features

• Data collection: Track data points like attribution APIs, topic APIs, audience APIs, campaign links and promo codes. 
• Reports and analytics: Drill down into your Instagram campaigns to create engagement and ROI reports. 
• Sentiment analysis: Define categories and get AI-powered analyses of engagement and conversations to find what customers 

Pros

• Easy to integrate 
• Customizable
• UGC opportunity discovery
• Accurate social data in real-time
• Reduce integration costs upto 80%

Pricing: Available on request

Sprout Social

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Sprout Social is a social media management tool that enables social listening. This feature helps you collect data on several trends and patterns and create topics using the query builder. 

Key features

• Topic insights: Gather data to serve trends, uncover patterns and gauge emotional response. 
• Query builder: Create topics that contain queries to listen to conversations 
• Smart inbox: Manage conversations across Instagram with a unified inbox. 
• Summarize by AI assistant: Get insights into longer listening messages. 

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Pros

• Ease of use
• Track conversations and trends 
• Unified inbox for conversations

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Cons

• Pricey when compared to other tools
• Trend analysis is available only for Twitter
• Social listening feature available only in the Enterprise plan 

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Pricing: Starts at $199 per seat per month

Agorapulse

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Agorapulse is a social media management tool that offers social media listening capabilities for platforms like Instagram. The feature has a search builder that lets you create searches using different listening parameters and a smart inbox to unify your communication.

Key Features

• Smart inbox: Label, assign, bookmark, hide, delete, and review inbox conversations so that support reps can easily manage inbox activities.
• Search builder: Create listening searches using different search parameters like hashtags, mentions and keywords, and geographic and language filters. 
• Search dashboard: See the overview of your active listening searches—volume, sentiment and engagement.

Pros

• Exceptional customer support 
• Powerful reporting capabilities
• Unified inbox for managing notifications and messages

Cons

• Higher price point
• Limited integrations
• Advanced features included in higher pricing tiers

Pricing: Starts at $49 per user per month

Two Examples of Instagram Listening Case Studies

Here are three case studies on Instagram listening you can try and take inspiration from. 

Carnivore Style’s Successful Product Launch

Carnivore Style launched their new product, "Meat Lover's Bundle". Yap says they noticed that their audience was engaging more with content that showcased the product's features and benefits rather than just promotional posts. 

Based on these insights, they adjusted their content strategy to create more educational content, such as recipe videos and product demos—and saw a significant increase in sales. 

Result: Carnivore Style sold out of the product within two weeks of launching it.

By listening to our audience on Instagram, we were able to tailor our content to their needs and preferences, resulting in a successful product launch.

Pet Playgrounds Increased Engagement

Jason Levine, Founder and Senior Marketing Analyst at EaseLocal, shares how they achieved this for their client, Pet Playgrounds. 

“We monitored conversations around pet safety and outdoor play, focusing on hashtags and keywords related to pet fences and pet owners' concerns. By analyzing these conversations, we identified a trend where pet owners expressed a need for secure, escape-proof fencing solutions.”

He further adds, "Based on these insights, we tailored our content to address these concerns directly, showcasing the unique features of Pet Playgrounds fences, such as their patented dig guard protection and anti-climb materials. We also engaged with users who mentioned these concerns, providing personalized responses and solutions.”

Result: The campaign resulted in a 30% increase in engagement rates, a 25% increase in website traffic from Instagram, and a 20% increase in sales inquiries related to our fencing solutions. The ROI was substantial, with a 15x return on our Instagram ad spend, demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging Instagram listening to drive targeted marketing efforts.

Best Practices for Instagram Listening

Ready to implement your Instagram listening strategy? Make sure you follow the three expert best practices on Instagram listening. 

Set Clear Objectives and KPIs

The first step to creating your Instagram listening strategy is setting clear objectives. What are your goals? What do you want to achieve with Instagram listening? Is it an increase in sales? Or is it brand awareness? Based on this, you’ll be able to gather relevant information:

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“Determine what specific information you want to gather (e.g., customer sentiment, competitor analysis, trending topics) and how you will measure success (e.g., engagement rates, follower growth, sentiment scores). This focus helps to streamline the listening process and ensures that the data collected is relevant and actionable. Additionally, using advanced tools and analytics platforms can help automate and enhance the accuracy of your listening efforts.” — Jason Levine, Founder and Senior Marketing Analyst at EaseLocal

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2. Use Instagram’s In-Built Features to Get Insights

Don’t just leverage Instagram listening tools. Instead, use Instagram’s native tools too. Here’s how you can do it:

“I use the Instagram Insights feature to track our top-performing content, identify our most engaged audience segments, and monitor our average video watch time. This information helps me understand what type of content resonates with our audience and adjust our content strategy accordingly.” — Gabrielle Marie Yap, Senior Editor & Culinary Entrepreneur at CarnivoreStyle

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3. Focus on the Questions Your Audience Asks

Study the listening insights you gather. This will help you improve your content strategy and future marketing campaigns.

“If you notice a particular type of content that resonates with your audience, create more of it. Pay attention to the questions people ask and address them in your posts.” — Marshal Davis, President at Ascendly Marketing

Don’t Just Listen to Instagram Conversations

Listening to your audience on Instagram is just one piece of the puzzle. There's a lot more you need to do.

a) You need to actively respond to comments and Instagram DMs and provide stellar customer service

b) You need to understand your audience's needs and pain points and refine your marketing strategy accordingly

c) You need to uncover user trends to optimize your Instagram content so that it resonates with your target audience

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FAQs

Q.1. Can you do social listening on Instagram?

Yes, you can do social listening on Instagram using social listening tools like Phyllo.

Q.2. What is the difference between social listening and social media monitoring?

Social listening is about listening to social conversations about your brand, products, and industry. In contrast, social monitoring is about monitoring social media messages that your company or brand receives and promptly responding to them.

Q.3. Is there an automated social listening tool for Instagram stories?

Yes, there are several social listening tools for Instagram stories. Mostly, you’ll find them in bundles on a single platform that offers social listening for Instagram. 

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