At first glance, social listening seems like a marketer’s dream: plug in some keywords, get real-time insights, and boom: content, strategy, and messaging made easy. But behind closed doors, many agencies and brands quietly admit it’s not working as promised.
Social listening is the process of tracking conversations, mentions, and sentiment across social media and online platforms to understand what people are saying about a brand, product, or topic.
In early 2018, PepsiCo launched Mountain Dew Ice with a Super Bowl commercial featuring Peter Dinklage and Morgan Freeman, promising to bring a caffeinated twist to the lemon-lime soda market.
The bet? That consumers were craving something like Sprite, but with an extra edge.
The insight? Social listening showed that conversations around clear citrus sodas were spiking. People were talking about freshness, lemon-lime flavours, and clean-looking drinks. So PepsiCo delivered exactly that, and yet, Mountain Dew Ice failed to resonate with consumers.
Social listening heard all of the noise, the hashtags, mentions and buzz about Sprite, but it missed the why: the signature taste, brand loyalty, and cultural significance. Consumers didn’t want a Sprite copy. Especially not one with an artificial aftertaste and branding that clashed with Mountain Dew’s identity.
Fans didn’t just ignore it, they rejected it. Online reviews mocked it as “Sprite but worse” and bottles sat expired on gas station shelves for months. By 2020, the flavour was quietly discontinued in North America, despite attempts to reformulate and rebrand.
While traditional social listening tools caught the volume of interest in citrus sodas, they missed the context, emotion, and buyer motivation. This is a textbook example of how surface-level social data can send even the biggest brands in the wrong direction.
Marketers rarely say it out loud, but traditional social listening tools can be more of a burden than a breakthrough. The dashboards look impressive, the metrics sound smart, but when it comes to actually helping teams make better decisions, most tools fall short.
Here’s why the frustration runs deeper than they admit:
You get thousands of mentions, charts, and sentiment scores, but no clarity. Teams spend more time cleaning up and sorting through data than acting on it. Some professionals report that they spend up as much 70% to 80% of their time cleaning up and sorting data. 28% of comments about data cleaning express frustration, identifying it as a major source of burnout and lost analysis time. Read the full OneCliq report here.
Sarcasm, memes, inside jokes, and pop culture references - these are the types of things that break the algorithms. Most social listening tools aren’t built to understand how people feel, they just use sentiment analysis techniques to decide whether a word is “positive” or “negative.”
Most tools pull from X (Twitter) and Instagram. YouTube, Reddit, and niche forums offer unique insights, but are often skipped by traditional tools. Reddit is one of the most trusted platforms for honest product reviews for Gen Z and Millennial consumers, with an archive of over 16 billion posts and comments.
Read the full OneCliq report here.
Traditional tools tell you what just happened, not what’s coming next. While there's value in analyzing the past, by the time something shows up in your dashboard, it’s already dying down.
When your competitors are looking at the same dashboards as you, it's hard to get ahead. You need to differentiate your insights with the next generation of tools to find a real edge.
These frustrations go unspoken because most marketers feel trapped: they don’t love social listening, but they don’t see any better options available to them.
Some of the most iconic companies have collapsed in the last few years, while others have thrived. The difference? The winners had live access to meaningful market insight and the ability to act on it in real time.
A classic example is Blockbuster. Despite the early warnings and clear signals that consumer preferences were shifting towards streaming, Blockbuster stuck to physical rentals. Meanwhile, Netflix, once nearly acquired by Blockbuster, was analyzing market behaviour and leaning into the rising demand for convenience and on-demand streaming. The result? Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010, while Netflix became a global entertainment powerhouse with over 300 million subscribers.
Another example is Kodak, a household name that actually invented the digital camera. Kodak buried its innovation out of fear it would cannibalize its film business. By failing to adapt, Kodak lost its edge over Canon and Sony, who embraced the digital imaging revolution.
In contrast, companies like Nike have thrived by investing heavily in consumer insights. Nike uses behaviour analysis and data-driven marketing to guide product innovation, marketing campaigns, and partnerships. This responsiveness has helped them stay ahead of trends and consumer expectations.
Ignoring insights doesn’t just mean missed opportunities, it's a risk to your company’s survival. In a fast-moving market, brands must listen closely and act quickly to succeed.
Marketers know traditional social listening isn’t cutting it, so they’re turning to other methods to get closer to real, actionable insights. Some of these methods are old school, some are new, but all of them have their pros and cons.
Some teams are going old-school with manual secondary market research: skimming Reddit threads, scrolling through TikTok comment sections, digging into Amazon reviews and YouTube rants.
Pros: You get raw, unfiltered insights and a better sense of emotional context.
Cons: It’s tedious, inconsistent, and impossible to scale across dozens of campaigns.
Price: From $500 per month for a single employee dedicating 3 to 4 hours per week to $10,000 per month for a small team dedicating 3 to 4 hours per day
For major launches or rebrands, some brands commission external research agencies for surveys, interviews, or focus groups.
Pros: Brings depth, structure, and expert analysis.
Cons: It’s expensive, slow to execute, and often outdated by the time results are delivered.
Price: From $4000 for a small focus group to over $100,000 for a research study
A new wave of platforms is emerging: tools that combine structured and unstructured data, pull from across the web, and use AI to detect emotional nuance and themes.
Pros: Offers real-time, emotionally intelligent insights across platforms like Reddit, YouTube, and forums.
Cons: Still a newer category, with a learning curve and limited awareness among some teams.
Price: From $50 per month to $1000 per month, depending on the tool and scale of your brand
OneCliq is part of this next generation of social listening tools. Instead of just tracking mentions, it finds meaning: why people say what they say, and how you can act on it instantly.
OneCliq isn’t just another social listening tool. It’s a real-time search engine for conversations that turns online chatter into clear, useful insights your team can actually use.
While most tools focus on hashtags and mentions, OneCliq goes deeper. It searches places like Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok, where people share what they really think and feel. It organizes that information so you can understand what your audience cares about and why.
With OneCliq, you're not just tracking what people say, you’re learning what it means. That helps you make faster, smarter decisions and create content your audience will connect with.
Social listening isn’t dead, but it’s no longer enough. Brands are realizing that just tracking mentions and sentiment isn’t the same as understanding their audience. Volume doesn’t equal value.
If you’ve ever looked at a dashboard full of charts and thought, “What do I do with this?” you’re not alone.
The good news? There’s finally a smarter way to cut through the noise, get to the heart of what consumers feel, and act on it before your competitors even see it coming.
Start a free trial with OneCliq and see first hand, your insights in full colour.
Written by Mihan Bandara
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