Most people think of analytics as numbers to quantify ROI: follower counts, likes, shares, impressions. Those metrics matter, but they don’t tell you why something is working, or why it isn’t. That’s where social listening comes in.
Social listening is the human side of a social media strategy. It’s about reading between the lines of your comments, DMs, and mentions to understand what your audience is really saying. Which questions are people asking? What sparks outrage? What resonates? When you start paying attention to sentiment, not just stats, you can use that insight to inspire content that fuels growth.
At Monarch, social listening is baked into our process, and our community managers are champions of the practice. It’s not just about checking notifications, it’s about capturing insights, documenting them, and feeding them back into content strategy.
Here’s how it works inside our agency:
This is why social listening is so valuable. It’s not extra work on top of your strategy; it is your strategy.
Throughout this series, we’ve been building Monark Wild Rice as a living example of what it looks like to grow a brand from scratch. Social listening has been one of the most important tools in that process.
Take our very first wild rice cooker video. It went unexpectedly viral in the Philippines and then spread globally with 1.3M views. Not because of paid ads or influencer partnerships, but because people connected it to a seed in their culture that pops in water and looks similar. The comments section lit up with cultural references, jokes about how “this isn’t rice” or how it “looks like nails,” and, importantly, genuine curiosity. Those questions about cooking methods and nutrition gave us the foundation for an entire content series that still drives growth today.
It also showed us that there are two very different sides to this audience. On TikTok, people love to troll and they expect brands to have a sense of humor. One of our favorite responses was to a comment that said, “why do yall American eat black rice.” We answered with “This is Wild Rice. Black rice is a totally different thing. And we’re actually Canadian. Sorry if we confused you.” with the Southpark Blame Canada theme song playing in the background. It worked and easily got 11k views, because it matched the energy of the platform. The best part is it took less than 5 minutes to make. With all of the trolling, there were plenty of thoughtful questions we answered with POV-style cooking videos and myth-busting content. Both approaches were rooted in listening first.
Across platforms, the insights play out differently. TikTok is driven by skepticism and humor, Instagram thrives on recipe inspiration and visuals, while YouTube Shorts reward quick, no-fuss how-to videos. That range has helped us refine content pillars without guessing and we already know what people want, because they’ve told us.
Listening has also shown us what’s missing. One of the most common questions we see is, “Is wild rice even rice?” That’s a complicated one to answer without expert backup, which means our next step will be collaborating with nutritionists and plant scientists who can explain it properly. Without listening, we wouldn’t know how critical that piece of authority will be as the brand grows.
If you’re a Food Scientist, Plant Biologist, Botanist, Agronomist or Nutrition Scientist/Dietician that wants to collaborate on some awesome content, reach out. We’d love to collaborate.
Social listening is more than community management. It’s the way you uncover opportunities you’d never see in a dashboard. It’s how you build trust by answering real questions. It’s how you fuel creativity with ideas that actually come from your audience, not just your team’s brainstorm. And it’s how you know when it’s time to scale, what to scale and whether that means bringing in expert voices, collaborating with other creators, creating a new type of content or an entire campaign series.
It’s the difference between posting content and building a brand.
Social listening is one of the reasons Monark Wild Rice is growing so quickly organically, and it’s one of the ways we create results for every brand we work on. The truth is, growth doesn’t come from guessing, it comes from paying attention, adjusting in real time, and building strategies rooted in what your audience is actually telling you.
This is what makes the difference between brands that post content and brands that build communities.
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