Social Listening is helpful throughout the problem, solution and business model validation phases, but for different reasons

Social listening is about looking for trends or patterns (consumer pull into specific areas, unmet needs, hot topics, etc.) related to your area of interest. At early stage it can help your team to find users and early adopters as well as providing insights into pain points. During Solution Validation it can help with testing, feedback and market comparison. Later in the life of your venture it will also keep you in touch with your users and their questions, concerns or compliments about your business.

Internet access, social media accounts and social listening tools like Hootsuite, Mention, Keyhole.