Social Listening and Social Monitoring: The Keys for Marketing Success
While the terms social media listening and social media monitoring are used interchangeably, they are different concepts that are key components in marketing success. In this article, we’ll take a look at the difference between these two terms, and how these different strategies can be used together on a broader scale for your brand.
The Keys for Marketing Success: Social Listening vs. Social Monitoring
Social media listening is the concept of taking the time to understand your audience. When you understand your audience, you can effectively improve your campaign strategies by accessing your brand and industry’s full spectrum of conversion.
On the other hand, social media monitoring is when you care for your customers by monitoring social media and responding to these messages to engage in relationship building.
Whereas social monitoring is reactive, social listening is proactive. You can change the social listening tools needed to understand your audience, but you can’t directly influence how your customers may respond. However, the beauty of social monitoring is that you can repair bad relationships while also creating new ones through your own actions.
Let’s break these differences down further.
Large vs. Small
Social media listening takes a broader, larger picture of your customers and how they discuss you on other websites. You can use social media listening in marketing as a means to gather data from your customer interactions. Building a comprehensive view of what your users are saying can help you understand how you can help.
Social media monitoring is a small scale but still essential means of improving relationships with customers. At this point, your users already have an impression of you, and whether this impression is positive or negative, you use your responses to provide accurate answers. Brands use monitoring to direct customers to the right section of a website or respond directly to questions, issues, or queries.
Automated vs. Manual
While conducting social media listening, you don’t need to take an active approach in understanding your audience. There are multiple websites, like Google Analytics, that track metrics like brand mentions, keywords, and trends for you. These websites will then place these insights in a format we can understand, like a graph or table.
However, social monitoring needs to be conducted manually, or else you could come across like a robot. Depending on your company’s size, you can keep track and comment on incoming questions yourself. Large businesses may require a social media manager, but the concept is still the same.
Active vs. Reactive
We looked at how social listening is active, whereas social monitoring is reactive, but you need both concepts together to form an empathetic answer your customers will trust.
Marketing can change how a customer preserves your brand, but there will always be customers who will either view your brand negatively or require extra help. A caring representative can completely change someone’s opinion about your business, but the interactions don’t stop with being reactive.
Through engaging with customers, a business can develop a long-term strategy based on wins and losses. For example, if you found an interaction went well on LinkedIn (your customer thanked you, gave you a good review, etc.), you can use that data to mimic that interaction in the future.
Social Listening and Monitoring Comes Down to Listening vs. Watching
Social media monitoring requires you to watch how people interact with your brand, which listening requires you to respond and interact. You need both skills to understand your audience. Using these methods in tandem with each other will give you the necessary information required to improve your marketing strategy.
