Social Listening
Social listening is the systematic observation of public posts on social networks, forums and review sites for mentions of your company, brand, products or relevant topics. It also captures mentions that neither link to nor tag the profile.
In practice
The practical value lies less in marketing than in early warning: noticing that complaints about a delivery time are accumulating lets you act before a public wave forms. For small companies, free means such as saved searches and alerts for name mentions usually suffice; paid tools only pay off at higher volumes. Bear in mind that analysing public posts can involve personal data and therefore falls under the General Data Protection Regulation, particularly if you store results or build profiles. Automated sentiment scoring copes poorly with irony and dialect and should not be taken as truth unchecked.