🔴 3 social listening tactics from a trendspotter and strategist

“Don’t pay attention to the negative comments” is terrible advice. For social strategists and creators, there are a few better places to find great ideas.

Our guest this week is Jazmin Griffith, a social listening expert who decodes social media chatter for brands such as Sony, Fenty, and Amazon. With a combined following of 360,000 across TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn, she's built her career decoding digital conversations for major brands and Fortune 500 companies while simultaneously growing her social listening agency, Que Lo Que. Jazmin’s enthusiasm for her work is magnetic; this is a fantastic episode.

In this episode:

• 🎧 What social listening tools can’t teach you (and how to close the gap)

•  📊 Why negative sentiment can be your biggest opportunity for growth

• 💼 Building a business at the intersection of data and cultural intelligence

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

• 00:00 Introducing Jazmin

• 01:06 What is social listening?

• 04:48 The most important datapoints as a creator

• 08:34 The newest tools to analyze your social media

• 10:44 Finding valuable content amongst the slop

• 14:35 The inspiration behind Que Lo Que

• 21:12 How you can use social listening as a creator

• 24:02 The value of LinkedIn over TikTok

• 27:15 Blurring the lines between influencer and creator

• 32:54 Gen Z's unique relationship with social media

• 38:45 Jazmin's social media evolution, from hobby to business-card

• 44:05 The difficulties of making content as a solo creator

🎧 If you prefer a podcast platform other than YouTube, we’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you tune in to your podcasts.

Turning sentiment into brand strategy

Working at the intersection of data and cultural insight for clients such as PepsiCo, Google Pay, and Sony, Jazmin Griffith built a career out of social listening — helping brands understand what people are saying about them online and transforming that feedback into strategic opportunities.

With over a decade of experience in social strategy and management, Jazmin has carved out a niche analyzing social conversations beyond surface-level metrics. Now, as founder of social listening agency Que Lo Que, she specializes in mining "dark social" — the private communities and channels that traditional analytics tools can't access.

The agency's name — Dominican slang for "what's up" — perfectly captures Jazmin’s approach: direct, culturally fluent, and authentic. With a combined following of 340,000 across TikTok and Instagram (plus another 20,000 on LinkedIn), she's built both a personal brand and a business around cultural intelligence as a service.

Her presence in a variety of private Facebook groups, Discord servers, and Slack channels has made her especially valuable to brands seeking insights beyond public-facing data. While most social listening tools track sentiment and engagement, she pays particular attention to metrics that reveal deeper connections, like post-shares and negative sentiment patterns. (More on this below in our Steal this Tactic section.)

As I listened to this conversation, a couple of things stuck out to me regarding Jazmin’s social capital and approach to decoding digital conversations:

• Jazmin’s own content pivot reveals the power of her methodology. When she transitioned from the emotionally raw breakup content that initially built her following (“People love a sad girl!”) to more professional topics, she initially lost engagement. Rather than forcing her original persona, she applied social listening to her audience — studying comments, creating polls, and analyzing responses — to find the intersection her audience responded to: content about navigating your 30s, balancing entrepreneurship with corporate work, and her “figuring it out” era. This helped her regain trust with her audience, and her engagement began to grow again.

• She noted that the absence of physical "third spaces" (like malls and movie theaters) has fundamentally changed how younger generations form relationships and consume content online. Now, our most authentic conversations happen in invitation-only digital spaces. If the most valuable brand insights are living where the most sophisticated tools can’t reach, I’m wondering if we'll see a growing divide between brands with cultural translators like Jazmin versus those relying solely on public-facing metrics. This shift suggests that brands will need genuine relationships with creators who can access and interpret these walled garden conversations.

Connect with Jazmin on LinkedIn or Instagram.
Learn more about Que lo Que.

1.5 million full-time creators

When the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) published their digital economy report in 2020, there were only 200,000 full-time creators. Their latest report, released last month, found that the industry has grown 7.5x since then. There are 1.5 million full-time creators in the U.S. today.

And more than 400,000 of them read Creator Spotlight.

Newsletter operators netting upwards of $1,000,000 in revenue each year. YouTube strategists behind the platform’s most performant content. Executives and founders building the tools and infrastructure powering it all.

Spotlight readers are the future of the creator economy. Get your message in front of them; partner with us.

Jazmin’s social listening playbook

For creators and brands looking to leverage social listening in their content strategy, Jazmin offers concrete tactics that can transform how you understand and engage with your audience.

Look for solvable problems in negative sentiment

While most brands fear negative feedback, Jazmin sees it as a goldmine of product development opportunities. "A lot of people think ‘negative’ is just ‘bad,’ and it's really not," she explains. "Usually within ‘negative,’ there's a problem that people are having." For creators, negative feedback could reveal content gaps, misconceptions about your work, or opportunities to reevaluate their approach to their audience.

She gives examples of seemingly negative comments that actually contain valuable product feedback: "I really hate that your bottles are plastic," or "Why do I see all this sugary stuff at the bottom of my soda?" These comments identify specific issues that companies can address. Creators might see similar opportunities in comments like “I wish you’d show more affordable options,” or if several people are inquiring about a link to a product.

When analyzing sentiment, Jazmin recommends:

1. Categorize feedback thoughtfully: Don't just dismiss comments as positive or negative; look closer to understand what specific issues they're addressing.

2. Look for patterns in complaints: When multiple people mention the same issue, it signals a significant opportunity; let this inform your content strategy.

3. Track how people talk about your peers and competitors: "If a brand is getting so many mentions month over month, let's dive into it.” Let the conversation in your peers’ comment section inform your strategy.

Focus on post-shares as emotional indicators

While many creators and brands focus on likes and comments, Jazmin believes that shares are the most valuable metric of engagement.

This perspective shifts how creators should evaluate content performance:

1. Prioritize share metrics: When comparing content performance, give extra weight to pieces with high share counts over any other metric

2. Study what gets shared vs. what gets liked: Beyond liking and commenting on a post, if people are taking the extra step to share your content, it’s often because your content has staying power. Whether your content offers guidance, education, humor, or something universally meaningful, it’s helping a consumer build a connection with others in their community.

3. Create "share-worthy" moments: Design content with elements that motivate sharing, which often means evoking stronger emotional responses

Mine your comment section weekly

For individual creators, Jazmin emphasizes that the comment section contains the roadmap to your content strategy, and recommends that creators implement a weekly system:

1. Look for recurring questions that indicate information gaps you can fill

2. Create polls on your LinkedIn, X, or Instagram Stories asking specifically what content your audience wants to see

3. Test content based on these insights and measure which formats drive the most engagement

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• The sharpest piece on the future of media you’ll read this week (The Mediator)

• Why “newsletter ad-only” businesses are dead (Newsletter Operator)