Social listening, in plain language.

AI social listening

Social listening where machine learning does the first pass: scoring each mention for sentiment, sorting it into categories, and ranking what needs attention, so people review a prioritized feed instead of reading every post.

API key

A credential used to authenticate requests without an interactive login. Social Line issues scoped API keys (read or read-and-write) from Settings, for scripts and MCP clients that don't support OAuth.

Auto-categorization

Automatically matching mentions against categories a team defines, like bug report, feature request, praise, or complaint, so triage starts pre-sorted instead of from a blank feed.

Boolean modifiers

Filters that narrow a keyword to a precise slice of the conversation, most simply as "require this term too" and "exclude mentions with this term," without writing a formal query language.

Brand monitoring

Tracking public mentions of a brand, product, or company name across the web and social platforms, typically scored for sentiment and reach.

Competitive analysis

Tracking a competitor's mentions the same way you track your own, to compare sentiment, volume, and reach side by side.

Crisis monitoring

Watching for a spike in negative mentions early enough to respond before it spreads, usually by ranking open negative mentions by the reach behind them.

Dark social

Sharing that happens in private channels, like DMs, group chats, and email, where no listening tool can see it. Social listening only covers public posts, so some conversation about any brand is always out of view.

Engagement

The likes, replies, and reposts a post receives, used alongside reach as a signal of how much attention a mention is getting.

Engagement rate

Engagement (likes, replies, reposts) divided by the audience that saw or could have seen a post. It shows how strongly people reacted, where reach only shows how many could have seen it.

Keyword

The term being tracked, a brand, product, competitor name, or campaign tag. Public posts matching it are pulled in from whichever platforms are enabled for that keyword.

Mention

A single public post, comment, or thread that matches a tracked keyword.

Mention volume

How many mentions a keyword collects over a period. A sudden rise, especially in negative mentions, is often the first visible sign of a launch taking off or a problem spreading.

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

An open protocol that lets an AI assistant like Claude call a service's tools directly. Social Line runs an MCP server so an agent can read and manage keywords, mentions, and settings on a user's behalf.

Needs Attention queue

A view of every open negative mention, ranked by reach at risk, so the highest-stakes conversation surfaces first instead of getting buried in a flat feed.

OAuth 2.0

A standard for granting an application access to an account without sharing a password. Social Line supports OAuth for MCP connections, revocable per connection from Settings.

Public dashboard

A read-only, shareable link to a project's mentions and analytics that doesn't require the viewer to have an account or log in.

Reach

The estimated size of the audience a mention could have reached, used to rank how much exposure a post carries.

Reach at risk

The combined estimated reach behind open negative mentions. Social Line ranks its Needs Attention queue by it, so the complaint most likely to be seen gets handled first.

Reputation score

A single 0-100 number rolled up from the sentiment of every tracked mention, banded (Strong, Mixed, At Risk) so it can be read at a glance.

Sentiment analysis

Classifying a piece of text as positive, neutral, or negative in tone. In social listening, it's applied automatically to each incoming mention.

Share of voice

The proportion of conversation about a category or topic that belongs to one brand versus its competitors, typically compared by mention volume.

Social intelligence

The insight a team draws from social data over time, such as what customers want, how a market is shifting, and how a brand is perceived, rather than the individual mentions themselves.

Social listening

Tracking and analyzing public conversation about a brand, product, or topic across social platforms, as distinct from just monitoring your own owned channels.

Social media monitoring

Tracking mentions of specific names or keywords on social platforms and responding to them one by one. Often used interchangeably with social listening, though listening usually implies also analyzing the patterns across mentions.

Triage

Working through mentions by status, typically open, follow up, done, or irrelevant, so a team can divide the work and nothing gets re-read or re-handled twice.

UGC (user-generated content)

Content, posts, reviews, comments, made by users rather than a brand itself. Most mentions tracked by a social listening tool are UGC.

Voice of the customer (VoC)

What customers say about a product in their own words, collected from surveys, support tickets, reviews, and social posts. Social listening adds the unprompted part: what people say when nobody asked them.