If you are looking at Brandwatch social media management, the question underneath is usually this: how do you find out what people are saying about your firm and your sector, and then act on it? This article does not review Brandwatch or describe its features. It answers that narrower question for a company of 10 to 250 people. It covers what listening means at your size, what to check before buying a specialist suite, and how to run the listening and response loop inside the levelpartner.ai platform where your contacts and inbox already sit.
The job behind the search
Large consumer brands buy listening software because thousands of strangers talk about them every day. A 60-person agency, consultancy, brokerage or estate agency has a different problem. The people talking about you are mostly prospects, clients and former clients, and they talk in comments, direct messages, reviews and the occasional post that tags you.
For a firm like that, listening is less about measuring sentiment across the internet and more about never missing a conversation that could become revenue or a complaint. Every comment from a prospect is a potential enquiry. Every unanswered message is a lead going cold. The useful question is not how much is being said, but whether someone on your team sees it and replies the same day.
What to check before choosing a specialist suite
Ask any listening or management vendor these questions, Brandwatch included, and write down the answers:
- How do comments and messages reach the person who should reply, and does the reply happen inside the tool or somewhere else?
- Does a conversation link to the contact record in your CRM, or does someone copy it across?
- Who in your team will log in daily, and do they need the depth the tool offers?
- What does the integration with your CRM involve, and who maintains it when either side changes?
- Which reports will your leadership actually read each month?
If the honest answers show a tool built for a dedicated social team you do not have, the cost is not the licence alone. It is the hours spent keeping two systems in step.
Before you start on the platform
- Your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google Business Profile accounts connected in the Social Planner.
- A named owner for social replies, with a backup for holidays.
- Your reply rules written down: what anyone may answer, what goes to a senior person, and what never gets a public reply.
- A pipeline stage or tag for enquiries that arrive through social.
How to work the comment queue
The daily listening loop starts with comments on your own posts. The planner gathers them in one place so the owner can work through them in a single pass.
- Go to Marketing > Social Planner > Comments.
- Read comments from posts published through the planner.
- Reply, like, or reply to threaded comments.
- Filter by Latest or Top.
- To clear a backlog, select the platform, apply filters, then Mark All as Read.
Listening at the right size
Once the comment queue is under control, route direct messages to a team in Conversations and add a workflow that notifies the owner when a new social enquiry arrives. Most of what a mid-size firm needs from listening comes down to three habits. Reply to every direct message and comment within one working day. Turn every buying signal into a contact and an opportunity. Read what clients say in reviews and adjust what you post. None of those needs a sentiment model. All of them need the conversation to arrive somewhere a person already works.
That is why putting social conversations in the same inbox as email, SMS and web chat matters more than the depth of any one report. When a prospect comments on a post and then sends an email a week later, your team sees one history, not two. For the wider picture of running every channel from one screen, see manage all social media in one place.
Say the agency receives around 120 comments and messages a month across three networks, and about a third wait more than two days for a reply. That would be 40 conversations a month going cold. If routing them to a three-person team with a notification workflow got most answered the same day, and even one in ten of those 40 was a seller asking about a valuation, that is four extra valuation conversations a month.
The trade-off
Specialist listening suites search far beyond your own accounts. If your firm needs to track how a whole market talks about a topic, or monitor competitors at scale, that breadth is real and the platform does not replace it. You give up that breadth by working inside your own accounts and reviews. For most firms in this size range, the conversations that move revenue are on their own pages, so the trade is a good one.
Buying a listening tool before you can answer the messages you already get. If comments on your own posts sit for days, more data will not help. Fix the response loop first, then decide whether you need to hear more.
Weekly time it takes
Plan on fifteen minutes a day for whoever owns social replies, and thirty minutes a week to review the report and adjust reply rules. Publishing is a separate job; see social media scheduler for that side of the work.
Troubleshooting
Comments do not appear in the Comments view. The account was connected with limited permissions. Disconnect it, reconnect it with an admin login on the business page and grant every permission requested.
Enquiries are not becoming opportunities. The workflow trigger is too narrow. Widen it to any inbound social message from a new contact, then let a person close the opportunity if it is not a real lead.
Replies go out in different tones. Several people reply without guidance. Save approved reply snippets for common questions and share your written reply rules.
The weekly report shows nothing. The source tag was never applied to older contacts. Apply it going forward and judge the report after a full month.
Frequently asked questions
Is Brandwatch the same as the social planner on the platform?
No. Specialist listening suites search public conversation widely. The platform's social tools publish posts, bring comments and messages into one inbox and tie them to contacts. They cover different jobs, so decide which job you need first.
Can I monitor mentions of my firm without a listening suite?
You can monitor everything that happens on your own accounts and in your reviews, which is where most client conversations take place. Wider web monitoring needs a specialist product.
How do I report on social to the partners?
Report on enquiries and opportunities from social, not on likes. The social media manager article covers who should own that report and how often to share it.