The Biggest Missed Opportunity in Social Media Has Nothing to Do With Marketing

It’s time to stop “social listening” and start “social doing.”

EXPERT OPINION BY JASON MITCHELL, CEO, MOVEMENT STRATEGY @MOVEMENTS

Illustration: Getty Images

Most brands are already familiar with social listening—using software to see trends in how brands are being discussed online. They all have access to the same tools, and most are tracking the same surface-level metrics like sentiment, volume, share of voice, and trending topics. But too few brands are willing to actually act on what they’re hearing. Instead, they use it to validate what they already believe, when the real value is in the moments when an audience is telling you something you don’t expect, forcing you to take action. 

That’s the difference between “social listening” and “social doing.” If “social listening” is observation, “social doing” is the response to that observation. Listening tells you what people are saying. Doing is what you choose to change because of it. That could be messaging, product, content, how you engage with your audience day-to-day or even something at the product level. 

This is the biggest missed opportunity—allowing social listening to inform the actual business, not just the marketing itself. I’ve seen brands use it to shape product decisions when patterns show up around unmet needs or recurring complaints. I’ve seen it influence customer experience when certain friction points come up repeatedly in comments or reviews. But I’ve also seen valuable insights go completely ignored by brands unwilling to take those insights seriously.

Plenty of brands are good at listening. But more need to be willing to move if they want to take advantage of the real power of social media.

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For brands, it can be hard to understand how social media insights can drive transformative action. But there are countless scenarios where social listening can go beyond a reporting function and instead become a vital decision-making tool.

There are times when a brand puts messaging into the world thinking it’s clear, and the audience immediately responds with confusion or skepticism, creating an opportunity to improve marketing. But there are also times when a brand picks up on confusion around how a product works, creating an opportunity to simplify the product or onboarding experience. That’s not a marketing fix, it’s a business fix – impacting partnerships, retail strategy, and even internal training – so you can make better decisions across the board.

Sometimes a brand community has better business ideas than the brands themselves. For example, when McDonald’s brought back the Snack Wrap in 2025, it wasn’t some surprise drop out of nowhere. People had been asking for it for years across social, consistently and loudly.

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