Understanding the Difference Between Social Media Monitoring and Social Media Listening

The purpose of this article is to build your knowledge base and understanding of the usefulness of social media monitoring and social media listening, so you can take the right steps in cultivating and interacting with your customers on social media.

By: Tyler Sadich | Director of Business Development

Does your organization need to do social media monitoring and social media listening?

Social Media is how people around the world share their thoughts and stay connected, so that means that it is a growing importance to get in on that conversation and to stay connected directly to your customers. In the past companies have relied on call centers as the sole communication path for customers. Now, more businesses are turning their attention to social media as a way of connecting with existing and potential clients.

Social users can broadcast their feelings with a far greater reach than even 10 years ago, so companies must be paying more attention to what is being said and how their messages are perceived. More than three-quarters of businesses now use social media for customer relations, and 40% of them say they have experienced improved customer service, thanks to the change.

That means that social monitoring and listening is becoming increasingly critical for business success.

Before we dig into details, let us get started with a simple breakdown of the two terms:

What is Social Media Monitoring?

Social Media Monitoring posts can help you stay on top of what is being said about your brand, identify issues, and quickly reply to customers. Think of Monitoring as the direct communication line between you and your customers. It is the find and reply method of interaction. It’s a reactionary approach, to provide an enhanced customer service experience.

What is Social Media Listening?

Listening helps you understand what your customers want and how they feel about your organization. Listening goes deeper than monitoring. It uses the social input of customers to detect trends, and to help you shape your organization’s products or goals to better meet your clients’ needs. Listening is a more proactive approach in shaping the direction of your brand within your industry.

How to use Social Media Monitoring

Social Media Monitoring is easier for a small business to do and less time consuming than Social Listening. Social Monitoring should be used as a tool to supplement your other methods of communication with customers. For most businesses, monitoring your social content is done by a customer service member who is searching for users’ mentions of your organization and your hashtags. That individual will then use those media posts to interact and engage with customers directly, to enhance their customer experience with your brand.

How to use Social Media Listening

Social Media Listening is used to give your business direction. You can gauge traction of campaigns, see engagement with your posts, and use feedback to improve your product strategy or company position. Analytics can then be used, as provided through a media monitoring system, to offer instantaneous additional insights.

Advantages of Social Media Monitoring:

easy to search, find, and react quickly to posts
communicate directly with customers
- answer customer questions
- address complaints
- reinforce positive experiences
lower cost
easier to do internally

Disadvantages of Social Media Monitoring:

takes time – monitoring adds labor costs, but is easily outweighed by the benefits
you are reacting to situations, rather than proactively defusing situations before they become problems
can be emotionally draining because people generally post about their problems on social media
have to remember to also search common misspellings of your business
must perform separate searches for each of your competitors

Disadvantages of Social Media Listening:

much more time consuming than Monitoring
difficult to quickly assess the effectiveness of your social campaign without going through each reaction post and determining the user’s sentiment
analytics can be skewed, and may not be an accurate representation of the public’s opinion, because people generally post about their problems with products or services on social media rather than what they like

How a Social Media Monitoring and Listening Services Will Transform Your Business

How valuable is your time?  The primary advantage of using a social media monitoring company is to eliminate the need to gather information and turn that content into usable data yourself.  An effective Media Monitoring Platform will be able to compile all the media mentions of: your company, all the common misspellings of your company, and all of your competitors. The service can identify and sort top influencers by mentions or number of followers.  Social media data is usually presented in charts, so users can quickly identify spikes in media mentions across each social platform.  Top level Media Monitoring Platforms can incorporate all media types into one monitoring dashboard, providing you with media mentions across: printed newspapers, online news sites, online blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, broadcast radio and TV.