Social Listening in Saudi Arabia: How to Measure Earned Media and Creator Impact in Arabic

Social listening in Saudi Arabia starts with an uncomfortable fact: most of what people say about your company is not on your page. It sits in creator videos, review pages, replies and comments, and it is written in Arabic, often in Saudi dialect, slang or Franco-Arabic.

So your official page reports look fine while the conversation that shapes buying happens elsewhere. If you only measure owned content, you are measuring the smallest part of your reputation.

This guide answers the practical questions: what to track, how to measure earned media and creator impact, and what to put in the report.

What is social listening in Saudi Arabia?

Social listening is tracking and analysing what people say about your company, your competitors and your category across social and online media. In Saudi Arabia, it means doing that in Arabic first, across the platforms Saudis actually use: TikTok, Snapchat, X, Instagram and YouTube, plus news and reviews.

The goal is not a mention count. It is knowing who is shaping the conversation, what they are saying, and how people feel about it.

What counts as earned media and creator impact?

Earned media is any conversation about you that you did not publish or pay for. In practice, that includes:

• Creator content: reviews, unboxings and comparisons by creators you did not brief
• Review pages and community accounts: independent pages that cover your category
• Customer posts and comments: experiences shared publicly, good and bad
• News coverage: articles and online publications that mention you

Creator impact is how much of that conversation a creator drives, and how their audience responds to it.

How do you measure earned media and creator impact in Arabic?

Follow these six steps.

1. Map where your conversation happens. List the platforms, creators and review pages that discuss your category. In automotive, for example, that often means independent review pages and owner communities, not just the official account.
2. Build keywords the way people write about you. Include Arabic spellings, English spellings, nicknames, common misspellings and Franco-Arabic. Mentions without a tag or with a typo are still about you.
3. Split owned from earned. Measure what share of total engagement comes from your own pages versus everyone else. This one number often changes how a team sets its budget.
4. Rank creators by conversation, not followers. Look at comments generated, the tone of audience replies and how often a creator is the source of wider discussion. A mid-size creator with an engaged audience can matter more than a large one.
5. Read sentiment and emotion separately. Sentiment tells you if a post is positive, negative or neutral. Emotion tells you why: excitement, frustration, trust or disappointment. Both need to be read in the dialect people used, whether Saudi, Emirati or Egyptian.
6. Benchmark and repeat. Compare your earned share and sentiment with your main competitors, then track it monthly so you see the trend, not a single snapshot.

Which metrics should go in the report?

Keep it short and decision-ready:

• Share of voice versus named competitors
• Owned vs earned engagement split
• Top creators and pages by conversation driven
• Sentiment and emotion trends, with example posts
• Emerging complaints or topics to act on

For deeper guidance on choosing creators to track, see our comparison of influencer and creator tracking tools in Saudi Arabia and MENA, or explore dima's social listening and analytics.

What mistakes should you avoid?

• Reporting reach as impact. Views do not tell you what people thought.
• Tracking only tagged mentions. Much of the earned conversation never tags you.
• Translating before analysing. Translation flattens dialect and sarcasm, and the sentiment read suffers.

What actually decides it

Measuring earned media in Saudi Arabia depends on reading Arabic the way it is written: Saudi dialect, slang, Franco-Arabic and the misspellings that come with fast typing. dima has captured 50M+ mentions across social and traditional media, including the conversations an official page never sees. When that Arabic is read accurately, earned media stops being a guess and becomes something you can measure. That is the specific problem dima was built to solve.

How much of your company's real conversation in Saudi Arabia does your current report include?

See your full earned media picture in Saudi Arabia, read in Arabic.