Social listening terms, defined clearly.
Operational definitions, not textbook ones, written by the analysts who run social listening and consumer intelligence for Fortune 500 brands across 12 LATAM markets and the US Hispanic audience. So everyone at the table reads the same conversation the same way.
What is social listening?
Capturing, analyzing and interpreting public digital conversation to drive business decisions, not vanity metrics. What it covers, what it doesn't, and how it differs from plain monitoring.
Read the definition →What is consumer intelligence?
Turning consumer conversation and behavior into clear readings C-level leaders can act on. Why it moves faster, and digs deeper, than traditional market research.
Read the definition →Social listening vs brand monitoring
Counting mentions isn't interpreting conversation. A side-by-side across 8 dimensions: output, depth, audience, the analysis layer and what each one actually tells leadership.
See the comparison →What is Share of Voice (SoV)?
Your brand's share of mentions against the full competitive set, in a given market and period. The formula, how to read it, and the mistakes that quietly distort it.
Read the definition →The rest of the vocabulary, in one line.
Sentiment analysis
Classifying conversation as positive, negative or neutral. It works as a thermometer, not as the only reading: volume and context matter as much as the sign.
Share of Conversation
What portion of a category's entire conversation a topic or a brand occupies. Unlike Share of Voice, it isn't limited to direct mentions: it measures presence in the debate.
Engagement rate
Interactions (reactions, comments, shares) over reach or followers. A follower isn't a person who reacts: engagement measures who actually moves.
Reach vs. impact
Reach counts how many saw it; impact, how many did something. A post with 25M views can generate more rejection than support.
Earned, owned and paid media
Earned: what others say without the brand paying. Owned: the brand's channels. Paid: advertising. Reading them separately avoids confusing diffusion with credibility.
NPS (Net Promoter Score)
A recommendation metric: promoters minus detractors. It measures stated loyalty, not what people say when no one is asking them.
Trend analysis
Telling a passing fad from a structural change by looking at the structure of the conversation — maturity, concentration, attention ratio — not sales, which arrive late.
Reputational intelligence
Measuring a brand's real exposure to a crisis or a sensitive topic, week by week, to decide when to step in and when silence deflates it.
Macro / micro / nano influencer
Three audience scales. Size doesn't predict impact: a nano-influencer can generate more engagement per follower than a macro.
Dark social
Conversation that happens through private channels — messaging, closed groups — and doesn't appear in the public feed. It exists even if it isn't easily measured.
Early crisis detection
Identifying the origin, time and account of an outbreak before it escalates, to respond in time instead of reacting late.
Public affairs intelligence
Reading the conversation about regulation, politics and public opinion that can affect a brand or a sector, before it becomes a topic.