AI Social Listening Every mention classified, answered or routed
Every mention of your brand is found within the hour, sorted by what it is, and answered in your voice — after your approval.
- Installed for you · one-time$249
- Run for you$247/month
- Custom build · this process$3,500–6,000 one-time
- Starts whenSchedule Trigger (hourly collection)
Covers up to 5,000 mentions a month across the standard sources; listening-provider subscriptions are yours. Additional languages, influencer identification or crisis playbooks are a custom build. Custom builds start at $2,000 site-wide; this band is for this process and its integrations.
AI Social Listening is an automation Agentmelt installs in Slack and HubSpot + Zendesk. The free template is a file you import yourself; the kit ($49) adds the setup guide and prompts. Installed for you costs $249 one-time and is live within two working days of access, with a recorded walkthrough and 30 days of fixes. Run for you costs $247/month, with setup and maintenance included. A custom build of this process is $3,500–6,000 one-time; custom builds start at $2,000 site-wide. No call is needed for any option. Written by Max Zeshut; last revised 2026-09-18.
Reference stack: Claude + n8n. Node names are on each step; the file is under the template.
Founder at Agentmelt
Reviews every build before it goes live; the workflow escalates to a person, never past one.
What is social listening?
AI social listening is the automated reading of the mentions a listening tool collects — your brand, your competitors, your category — across X, LinkedIn, Reddit, review sites, YouTube comments and news, so that each one becomes an action instead of a line in a dashboard. A workflow collects the mentions hourly, removes reposts and homonyms, classifies each by intent (buying question, complaint, support request, praise, competitor comparison, PR risk) and sentiment, drafts a reply in your voice for the ones worth answering, and routes the rest: buying questions to sales as a lead, complaints to the help desk, PR risks to the communications lead. A social media agent in this sense does not post on autopilot — a person approves every reply with one click.
- We pay for a listening tool and nobody opens it.
- A customer complained on Reddit on Friday and we saw it on Tuesday.
- Buying questions in the comments — “does it work with X?” — go unanswered while sales waits for leads.
- Share of voice against competitors is a slide we build by hand once a quarter.
- The one person who runs social is also the one who has to notice a PR problem at 2 am.
If two of these are yours, this is the process to look at first. Free audit — or read on.
What it looks like once it runs.
Social listening produces a firehose nobody reads. The workflow reads it: mentions of your brand, competitors and category from X, LinkedIn, Reddit, review sites, YouTube comments and news are collected hourly, classified by intent (buying question, complaint, praise, support request, competitor comparison, PR risk) and sentiment, and turned into actions — a drafted reply for approval, a lead for sales, a ticket for support, or an alert for whoever handles risk.
- Every hour Mentions across social, review sites and forums are collected; reposts and bots are dropped.
- Each mention Classified: buying question, complaint, praise, competitor comparison, PR risk.
- For replyable ones A draft in your voice waits in Slack for one click; buying questions also become a lead in the CRM.
- Friday Share of voice, sentiment trend and the unanswered buying questions, in one report.
Mentions are checked when someone remembers. Buying questions on Reddit go unanswered, complaints on X escalate, and the competitor comparison thread that decided a deal was never seen. Listening tools show dashboards; nobody owns the follow-through.
Every relevant mention is acted on within the hour: replies drafted in your voice and approved with one click, leads in the CRM with the thread attached, complaints in the help desk, risks in front of the right person. A weekly report shows share of voice, sentiment trend and the recurring themes worth a piece of content.
Trigger, then 8 steps.
Seven of the eight steps run without anyone. Step 06 waits for a person.
Schedule Trigger (hourly collection)
Collect mentions
Brand, product, executive, competitor and category keywords across X, LinkedIn, Reddit, G2/Capterra/Trustpilot, YouTube comments, Hacker News and news APIs — directly or via Brand24/Mention.
De-duplicate and filter
Removes reposts, bots and irrelevant homonyms (a keyword that is also a common word) using rules learned from prior corrections.
Classify intent and sentiment
Buying question, complaint, support request, praise, competitor comparison, PR risk, irrelevant — plus sentiment and an urgency score based on author reach and tone.
Draft the response
For replyable categories, a short response in your brand voice that answers the actual question, references the right resource, and never argues. Complaints get an acknowledgement and a route to support, not a public defence.
Route by category
Buying questions and comparisons → sales with a CRM lead; complaints and support → help desk ticket; PR risk → comms lead alert; praise → approved reply and a testimonial candidate list.
Approve and post
Drafts wait in Slack for one-click approval by the social manager; approved replies post through the platform API or are handed to the community manager where APIs restrict posting.
Log everything
Every mention, classification, action and response time is logged for the report and the classifier's feedback loop.
Weekly listening report
Share of voice vs competitors, sentiment trend, top themes with example mentions, unanswered buying questions, and three content ideas drawn from recurring questions.
Every relevant mention is acted on within the hour: replies drafted in your voice and approved with one click, leads in the CRM with the thread attached, complaints in the help desk, risks in front of the right person
Every relevant mention is acted on within the hour: replies drafted in your voice and approved with one click, leads in the CRM with the thread attached, complaints in the help desk, risks in front of the right person.
One decision, at step 06. Seven steps ran without you.
Each pattern page explains it in plain words and lists every automation that uses it.
The template is built on n8n (how the n8n AI Agent node works); the same steps run on Make, Zapier or plain code. The tool is chosen to fit your accounts, you own the result, and the template comes in all three formats.
Data it touches
- Platform APIs (X, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube) or a listening provider (Brand24, Mention)
- Review sites (G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, app stores)
- News API
- CRM and help desk for routing
- Brand voice guide and approved responses
Guardrails
- Nothing is posted publicly without human approval; the agent drafts.
- Complaints are acknowledged publicly and resolved privately — the agent never debates in public.
- PR-risk classifications bypass drafting and go straight to a person.
- Author reach and account age feed urgency so a journalist's question is not treated like a bot's.
Listening without follow-through is a dashboard
The value of a mention is in what happens next, within the hour it is still relevant. A buying question on Reddit answered the same afternoon becomes a lead; answered next week it is a lost deal to whoever replied first. The workflow's design principle is that every classified mention ends in an owner and an action, and the report measures response time, not mention count.
Classification that respects reach
Not all mentions are equal. A complaint from an account with 40,000 followers, or a question from a journalist, needs a person in minutes; a spam bot needs nothing. Urgency combines the classified intent and sentiment with the author's reach and history. That is what lets a two-person marketing team run listening at all: they see the ten mentions that matter, not the four hundred that do not.
The weekly report writes your content calendar
Recurring questions in the mentions — 'does it integrate with X', 'how does it compare to Y', 'why did Z change' — are the content people are asking for. The agent's weekly report lists them with examples and proposes three pieces. It is the cheapest content research a team can get, and it comes out of a workflow that is already running.
What it connects to.
| Tool | Role in this workflow |
|---|---|
| n8n | Collection, classification pipeline, routing, reporting |
| Brand24 / Mention / platform APIs | Mention sources |
| Claude | Classification, drafts, weekly report |
| Slack | Approvals and alerts |
| HubSpot + Zendesk | Leads and tickets |
Want this running without building it?
$247/month
We set it up in your tools, run it on our servershost it on our n8n cloud (or deploy it to your own n8n, Make or Zapier), watch it, and fix it when something changes. Setup included, cancel monthly; the automation stays yours if you leave.
$3,500–6,000 one-time
Your systems, your rules, your edge cases. A one-off build delivered into your accounts to keepon Claude and n8n, delivered into your accounts to keep, with documentation and a recorded walkthrough.
Covers up to 5,000 mentions a month across the standard sources; listening-provider subscriptions are yours. Additional languages, influencer identification or crisis playbooks are a custom build.
Also sold one-time, installed in your own accounts, as part of the marketers package and the content creators package and the marketing teams package — do it yourself $49 · installed for you $249 · done for you $490.
When this becomes a custom build.
The subscription covers the standard version — $247/month, setup and maintenance included. Three things move it to a custom build ($3,500–6,000 one-time), delivered into your accounts to keep. If one of them is you, say so on the audit and the plan prices both.
Additional languages or markets.
Influencer identification and outreach as part of the workflow.
Crisis playbooks with escalation rules and pre-approved holding statements.
Running the standard version first is the usual path: the exceptions it logs in the first month are the scope of the custom build, with your own numbers. How custom builds work.
Frequently asked questions.
Can it post replies automatically?
It drafts; a person approves and the reply posts through the API where the platform allows it (X, LinkedIn company pages, Reddit with a brand account). For platforms with restrictive APIs, the approved draft is handed to the community manager.
Do we need a listening tool?
Platform APIs cover X, Reddit, YouTube and news; LinkedIn and review sites are easier through a provider like Brand24 or Mention. Either setup works with the workflow.
How does it handle a crisis?
PR-risk classifications skip drafting and alert the comms lead with the thread and the author's reach. A crisis playbook with pre-approved holding statements is a custom addition.
Can an AI agent run our social media on autopilot?
It can read, classify and draft — and it should not publish without a person. Replies posted by a model without approval are how brands end up in screenshots. This workflow drafts the reply, puts it in Slack for a one-click approval by the social manager, and posts only after that click. Everything else — routing, logging, the weekly report — runs on its own.
What is the difference between social listening and social monitoring?
Monitoring collects and counts: mentions, sentiment, share of voice. Listening acts on what was said: answering the buying question, opening the support ticket, warning the comms lead. Most tools stop at monitoring; the workflow adds the listening layer on top of whatever tool you already have — Brand24, Mention, or the platforms directly.
Can social listening be used for competitive intelligence?
Yes. Competitor and category keywords are collected alongside your own, and the weekly report shows share of voice, sentiment trend and the themes people raise about each competitor, with example mentions. Threads where someone weighs you against a competitor are routed to sales as a lead with the conversation attached.
What this blueprint is built on.
Vendor documentation the steps rely on, and the rules the guardrails are written against.
- Meta — Graph API developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/
- X — Developer platform overview docs.x.com/overview
- Slack — API documentation api.slack.com/docs