How to understand how people feel about my brand?
Social listening and consumer intelligence SaaS
If you don’t know how people feel about your brand, you’re basically flying blind with a very expensive logo. Feelings drive word of mouth, renewals, recommendations, and whether prospects even give you a chance. When you can clearly see what delights, frustrates, or confuses people, every decision in marketing, product, and CX gets sharper—and your brand stops being a guess and starts being a measurable asset.
Start by defining what you actually mean by “how people feel”: awareness, trust, satisfaction, and likelihood to recommend. Then map where those feelings show up: social media, reviews, support tickets, sales calls, communities, and search queries about your brand.
Set up a social listening workspace on the platforms where your audience is most active (X, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, forums):
Start by creating keyword rules for your brand name, product names, key people, and main competitors. As new mentions come in, tag each post with sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) and, if possible, a topic label such as “praise,” “bug,” “pricing,” “support,” or “feature request.” Aim for consistent rules so different teammates would tag the same post in the same way.
Then, review your tagged data weekly: sort by negative posts to spot recurring complaints, and by positive posts to identify what people love most. Save representative screenshots and direct quotes into a shared document or slide deck - these become powerful “voice of the customer” examples that explain why your metrics look the way they do and help teams prioritize fixes and improvements.
Combine this with direct feedback: short surveys, NPS (“How likely are you to recommend us?”), and one-to-one interviews with customers and churned users. Ask what nearly stopped them buying, what delighted them, and what they tell friends about you.
Finally, quantify and track over time. Build a simple sentiment dashboard that shows: volume of mentions, sentiment trend, top topics, and key issues by segment (e.g., agency vs. brand vs. SMB). Revisit monthly. The goal isn’t a perfect score, but a living picture of how people feel and what you should fix or amplify next.
The platforms specifics:
X: real-time short posts mentioning your brand, product names, executives, hashtags.
Reddit: longer discussions in relevant subreddits (e.g., industry, product, tech, local communities).
YouTube: video reviews, unboxings, “first impression” videos + comments.
What to do:
Collect mentions of your brand, key products, and competitors across all three.
Run sentiment analysis (positive/negative/neutral, emotion tagging).
Create a dashboard tracking sentiment over time: spikes, drops, volume.
Segment by topic (price, quality, service, UX) and channel (X vs Reddit vs YouTube).
Understanding how people feel about your brand becomes powerful when you translate vague impressions into concrete signals, sources, and trends over time. By combining social listening, reviews, and direct feedback, you get both the numbers and the stories behind them. Make that view visible in a simple, recurring dashboard and it becomes a shared truth that aligns marketing, product, and CX around what to fix, protect, and amplify next.
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