Social Monitoring vs. Social Listening
By: Kimberly Grant
There’s a whole movement going on in the world of social media and you’re missing it. This movement operates unseen by regular consumers. This movement is created and analyzed with special tools. And, this movement can help your brand become what it needs to be. It’s called social listening.
Monitoring vs. Listening
There are two ways that brands leverage social media to help build their brand and make it better. Social monitoring allows a brand to see what’s being said and liked about their brand, products, services, and competitors. This type of monitoring can be measured to see surface level things like how positively or negatively people feel about your new book.
And then there’s social listening. Social listening is like the cuter cousin of social monitoring. With social listening, you can analyze all of the metrics that come with social monitoring and then figure out the “why” behind your feelings. Why did your customers like your second book, but not your fourth? Was it the characters? Was it the location? Was it the plot? Basically, with social listening, you take action on your insights, instead of just knowing and doing nothing about it.
For more insight on social monitoring and social listening, you can see this Hootsuite article.
Advantageous Listening
When social listening, it’s important to keep the advantages in mind for why it’s so important. Some advantages of social listening include:
- Engage with customers – create goodwill and boost engagement
- Manage crises – address public relations disasters before they get out of hand
- Track competitors – capitalize on where you competitor is lacking
- Find pain points – Get ideas for new products and improvements for current products
There are a lot of other advantages of social listening. These advantages lead to building a better brand. They also make growing your brand a no-brainer. Imagine knowing that your customers don’t like the fact that your product takes too long to ship. Then, you investigate the shipping delays to find out that the shipping company you’re using is a small operation that can’t support the demand. You could contract with an additional delivery company to lessen delivery times and create more happy customers.
Tools of the Trade
Now that we know what social listening is as opposed to social monitoring and we know the advantages, it’s time to look at the tools. After all, social listening is more than just looking at a few tweets. You have to analyze your data like all good marketers would. You can use tools like Hootsuite, ReviewTrackers, and Adview to get a better sense of your social media presence and what you need to do to increase positive brand recognition.
(Alert! This is not a paid endorsement.) Since I’m still actively building my brand, I only have experience with one of these tools. Hootsuite, so far, has been a smooth process in managing my social media and listening. Hootsuite allows you to integrate all of your social in one location and manage them at a glance. You can even listen to what people are saying based on mentions, keywords, and comments.
Beyond Monitoring
When social monitoring, you’re only getting the surface level of information. You’ll get metrics, but those metrics will only tell half of the story. Meanwhile, social listening allows you to look at the past, present, and future of your brand through the eyes of your current and potential customers. Once you’ve listened, you can respond in a way that fosters goodwill toward your brand.
Lastly, when it comes to social listening and the ways in which this listening can be leveraged, it’s important to keep in mind a few things:
- Listen everywhere to get a more holistic view
- Learn from your competition’s mistakes and triumphs
- Roll with the changes so that you are adapting to whatever comes your brand’s way
- Take action so that you can continue to move your brand forward
Keeping the above in mind, social listening is the way to go when developing your brand. Yes, it’s time consuming, but Rome wasn’t built in a day; and neither are great brands.
Looking for more social insight? You can read my recent post here.
