If youre a digital marketer, youre probably familiar with the terms “social listening” and “social monitoring.” Despite the similar names, they are not interchangeable. In fact, they represent distinct strategies â different enough that opting for one over the other can yield entirely different outcomes in your marketing funnel. Thats why its essential to explore the “social listening vs. social monitoring” question and discover how each process can enhance the user experience. Understanding the nuances between these two practices can significantly impact your marketing success. So, lets take a closer look at both approaches.
Social media has become an indispensable tool for businesses to connect with customers and gather insights With billions of people using social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter every day, it’s no surprise that brands are eager to tap into these conversations
However, with the sheer volume of social data available it can be challenging to make sense of it all. That’s where social listening and social monitoring come in.
These tactics allow you to track relevant conversations happening online and use those insights to inform your marketing and business strategies. But what exactly is the difference between social listening vs social monitoring?
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll break it down for you:
What is Social Media Monitoring?
Social media monitoring refers to tracking and responding to mentions of your brand, products, or services on social platforms.
The goal is to listen for direct references to your company so you can jump in and engage where appropriate. For example:
- Mentions of your brand name (including common misspellings)
- Feedback about your products and services
- Questions or complaints about your business
- Mentions of your competitors
Brands can monitor social conversations through built-in platform tools or third-party social media management software. Either way, monitoring helps you:
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Provide real-time customer service – Respond to questions and complaints quickly and resolve issues before they escalate.
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Protect brand reputation – Catch negative feedback early and address problems or controversies head-on.
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Build brand awareness – Engage with followers by liking and commenting on relevant posts.
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Get quick feedback – See people’s candid reactions to your products, campaigns or events as they happen.
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Gain market insights – Identify potential opportunities or threats based on what customers are saying.
Tools for Social Media Monitoring
Platforms like Facebook and Twitter offer some basic tools to track mentions and keywords. But to monitor conversations across multiple networks, you’ll need a specialized social media management platform like:
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Hootsuite – Track keywords and brand mentions across social networks all in one dashboard via Hootsuite Streams.
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Sprout Social – Centralize social media monitoring and respond to messages from one inbox.
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AgoraPulse – Monitor keywords and filter for relevant conversations across platforms.
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Mention – Get alerts for brand mentions and analyze sentiment.
What is Social Listening?
Social listening casts a much wider net than monitoring. The goal is to identify and analyze all conversations related to your brand, competitors, industry, and relevant topics.
Rather than looking just for direct brand mentions, social listening explores the entire social landscape to uncover trends, patterns, and actionable insights.
For example, social listening can help you:
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Track relevant industry keywords (not just your brand name).
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Gauge market share of voice against competitors.
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Identify and analyze emerging trends or changes in sentiment.
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Discover influencers and advocates relevant to your brand.
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Better understand your target audience by exploring their interests, challenges, and needs.
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Gain insights to inform PR, content strategy, product development, and more.
Tools for Social Listening
Going beyond the free platform tools, robust social listening requires dedicated software like:
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Sprout Social – Offers advanced Twitter analytics and customizable social listening dashboards.
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Mention – Tracks brand, keyword, and industry mentions across the social web.
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Hootsuite – Social listening integration with Talkwalker coming soon.
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Awario – Allows keyword tracking across social networks, blogs, forums, and more.
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BuzzSumo – Provides social data and lets you analyze performance by topic or influencer.
Social Monitoring vs. Social Listening
Now that we’ve defined both practices, how exactly do social monitoring and social listening differ? Here’s a quick breakdown:
| Social Monitoring | Social Listening |
|---|---|
| Focuses on direct brand mentions | Explores broader conversations around industry keywords, topics, competitors |
| Real-time tracking and response | Identifying patterns and trends over time |
| Reactive | Proactive |
| Smaller scale | Bigger picture |
| Customer service, reputation management | Competitive and market analysis, insight mining |
While social monitoring and listening have distinct purposes, they can work together to provide a complete view of relevant social conversations.
Monitoring surfaces urgent brand mentions that require immediate response.
Listening uncovers macro-level trends and insights to inform high-level marketing strategies.
Let’s look at some real-world examples of how to use each activity:
Social Monitoring Use Cases
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A customer tweets a complaint about a delayed order. Your team can quickly respond, apologize, and resolve the issue.
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Users comment on an Instagram ad asking questions about the product. You can address each query directly in the comments.
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After announcing a controversial policy change, you notice lots of angry comments on Facebook. You can respond to mitigate damage to your brand reputation.
Social Listening Use Cases
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By tracking relevant industry keywords over time, you identify a growing interest in sustainable packaging. You decide to highlight your eco-friendly boxes in upcoming content.
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Competitor listening reveals they recently launched a successful social media contest. You make plans to run a similar campaign.
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Tracking audience demographics and interests on social listening dashboards provides insights to create more targeted content.
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Monitoring spikes in traffic and engagement helps you determine the optimal times to post on social media.
Developing a Social Listening and Monitoring Strategy
Hopefully now the difference between these two activities is clear. But how exactly should brands go about implementing them?
Here are best practices for developing an effective social listening and monitoring strategy:
Set Clear Goals
Be specific about what you want to accomplish with social listening and monitoring. Do you want to better understand your audience, monitor brand reputation, gain competitive intelligence, or guide your content strategy? Define your objectives upfront so you can focus your efforts.
Find the Right Tools
As discussed above, specialized social media tools are a must for listening and monitoring at scale. Do your research to find software that fits your budget and has the capabilities you need. Look for platforms that integrate social inbox, analytics, listening, and publishing.
Know Your Keywords
The keywords and phrases you track will determine the conversations surfaced. Create lists relevant to your brand, products, competitors, and industry. Also include misspellings, abbreviations, and alternate phrases.
Look Beyond Your Own Channels
Focus on where your audiences are actually talking, not just your owned social channels. Listen across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, forums, review sites, Reddit, and anywhere else your customers are.
Monitor Competitors
Keep tabs on competitors by tracking their brand handles, products, campaigns, and relevant industry terms. See what resonates with their audience and where you can differentiate.
Set Up Alerts
Get notified of important keyword mentions so you can respond quickly. Especially set up alerts for your brand name and urgent issues like “broken,” “defective,” “complaint,” etc.
Analyze and Optimize
Regularly review your listening reports and dashboards. See which topics and campaigns generate the most buzz. Double down on what’s working and reconsider what’s not.
Collaborate Across Teams
Share key social listening insights with colleagues in PR, customer service, product development, and more. Use the data to guide decisions across departments.
Real-World Examples of Social Listening and Monitoring
To see these tactics in action, here are some real-world examples of brands effectively leveraging social listening and monitoring:
JetBlue
When major winter storms caused mass flight cancellations and delays over the 2021 holidays, JetBlue leveraged social listening to monitor affected travelers’ sentiment.
By tracking brand mentions and keywords like “angry,” “delayed,” and “cancelled flights,” they identified frustrated flyers and responded in real-time. JetBlue apologize, offered support, and kept travelers updated, mitigating backlash.
Sephora
Beauty brand Sephora takes a proactive approach to social listening. They use Talkwalker to analyze mentions and conversations around relevant hashtags like #Sephora and #BeautyTips.
These insights help Sephora identify their top advocates and influencers. They also guide Sephora’s content creation and ensure their posts resonate with followers.
Headspace
Meditation app Headspace increased their follower base by 48% using social monitoring and listening. How? By jumping into conversations where people mentioned stress triggers or mental health issues.
Their timely, empathetic responses built community and established Headspace as a brand that truly listens to customers.
Moz
After noticing growing conversations about website chatbots on social media, marketing software company Moz decided to test out the technology themselves.
Based on positive feedback from beta users, they fully launched live chat as a new product feature. This shows how social listening insights can directly guide business decisions.
Key Takeaways
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Social monitoring involves tracking direct brand, product, or service mentions in real-time to engage with customers.
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Social listening encompasses analyzing industry
Micro vs. Macro
Social monitoring operates on the micro level, where customer service personnel actively search for customers queries, issues and comments to provide prompt responses. This tactic involves scanning through various feeds on public platforms to identify relevant notifications and address them accordingly. On the other hand, social listening works at the macro level, focusing on how customers perceive not only your brand but also your industry as a whole. It involves analyzing conversations involving your direct customers, your competitors customers, and industry experts to gain a comprehensive view of your brands position within the domain. In essence, social monitoring is like observing individual trees, while social listening is akin to viewing the entire forest. While social monitoring is a component of social listening, the latter includes a broader scope that goes beyond individual interactions to provide a holistic understanding of the brands standing in the larger context of the industry.Â
What is social listening?Â
Social listening is a digital marketing strategy that involves identifying and examining online conversations related to your brand and industry domain. Marketers draw insights from ongoing discussions to refine tactics, set goals and benchmark activities. Essentially, you gather data from your social media platforms and focus on how customers in your industry interact on the web, including interactions with competitors and their customers. This analysis encompasses all conversations around your domain, even if your brand is not explicitly mentioned or involved. By homing in on the relevant conversations, you can identify potential gaps in your customer-facing messaging and gather ideas on how to minimize risk while better catering to customer needs. Social media listening often yields valuable data for creating campaigns, improving brand messaging, optimizing content strategy and enhancing influencer marketing efforts. Moreover, it serves as a powerful tool to initiate impactful conversations with your customers.
Social Listening vs. Social Media Monitoring: What’s the Difference and Why Do We Need It?
What is the difference between social media monitoring and social media listening?
Social media monitoring and social media listening are terms that have been used interchangeably, but there is a difference. Social media monitoring = Caring for your customers by monitoring social media for messages directly related to your brand and responding to those messages appropriately.
What is social listening & how does it work?
Social listening is able to identify social trends and highlight your brand’s strengths and weak spots. There’s a common saying in the marketing world (yes we do have our own sayings) that goes like “social monitoring is the trees; social listening is the forest”. See Awario in action with a free 7-day trial. No credit card required.
What is social media listening?
Social media listening = Understanding your audience and improving campaign strategy by accessing the full spectrum of conversation around your industry, brand, and any topics relevant to your brand. In essence, monitoring tells you what, listening tells you why. Monitoring addresses the symptoms, and listening reveals the root cause.
What is social monitoring & social listening?
When we talk about social monitoring, we’re focusing on the “what” – understanding what’s being said about your brand. On the other hand, social listening is like tuning in to your audience’s favorite radio station. It’s about understanding the “why,” gaining a deep understanding of your audience, and refining your campaign strategy.
