Social Media Listening vs Social Media Monitoring

Social media is one of the most versatile digital marketing tools out there, but how can you use social media to ensure customer care and customer journey development? This is social media listening vs social media monitoring explained.

What is social media listening?

Social media listening is the process of analysing conversations and online trends in relation to your brand and industry. Take these insights and implement the results into your marketing campaigns in order to further develop your marketing efforts.

The purpose of social listening is to understand where, how and why the conversations online are happening. Then determine what people think outside of directly contacting your brand.

This can help inform future marketing campaigns, and further develop your content strategy and online messaging. It can also help overtake competitors and develop influencer strategies to build more impactful and effective brand partnerships.

Social media listening is used to track social mentions, read conversations, discover online superfans and influencers and check out competitors.

What is social media monitoring?

Social media monitoring and social media listening are similar tasks. However, social media monitoring focuses more on acting as the brand’s customer support on social media. With social media monitoring, a representative behind the social media account joins the conversation. They would engage with and responds to customers’ posts on social media.

Social media monitoring can find these posts without the brand being directly mentioned but by tracking them. It allows the brand to respond to its customers online to provide good customer service. As a result of this, the brand prevents issues or queries from escalating.

Brands may use social media monitoring for a variety of reasons. They can; answer questions about the brand, resolve issues of complaints from customers, or thank customers who provide feedback.

Social media monitoring vs social media listening

Both the terms social media monitoring and social media listening are often used together despite their differences. Conducting both processes is relatively similar but ultimately the scale on which each action is performed is different.

Whilst only 61% of brands said they currently use social listening, 82% said they feel it is important to their brand online.

Social media monitoring is performed at a micro-scale. Social media listening is on a macro scale.

Most brands use social media monitoring nowadays but many fall short by not using social media listening to understand their customers. Leaving missed opportunities to improve the customer experience through changes made by studying the audience insights online.

Social media monitoring is a short-term solution where you react to your audience and their discussions online. An example of this would be when a customer makes a complaint and you respond by offering an apology and solution.

Social media listening is proactive and present. It aims to create a lengthier long-term solution by adapting your business process using customer experience insights. An example of this would be seeing complaints regarding the checkout process of your website online.

Using social media listening you would see the insights and if others are affected by this. This would lead to using what you have found to fix the problem so other future customers don’t have similar issues.

Social media listening vs social media monitoring – which should you use?

The simple answer here is both. Don’t try to choose between one or the other.

Both are beneficial to progressing your business with your customers at the forefront. Brands should be taking advantage of these online in order to understand their customers and their needs.

Use social media monitoring to ensure your customers are cared for online. And use social media listening to improve and adapt the customer journey between them and your brand.

It is vital that you don’t limit your brand by using short-term fixes to customer problems. Prioritise your customer journey and ensure every step is smooth and shows what your brand is really about.

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