Brands succeed when they speak their audience’s language, and when it comes to understanding audiences, social media is one of the most valuable tools at our disposal. In this blog, we’ll outline the benefits of social media monitoring vs. listening, so you can leverage key social media insights in the way that best suits your current goals.
Back in 2010, Dan Neely proclaimed: “Monitoring finds symptoms; listening finds causes”, and it appears his advice remains as relevant now as ever.
The buzzword “social listening” has steadily risen in use over the last decade, but what does it mean and how can it change the way businesses engage with their customers?
Google search data showing ‘Social media listening’ (red) vs. ‘Social media monitoring’ (blue) between 2004-2024. Data: Google Trends.
What Is Social Media Monitoring?
Social media monitoring is often a key element of a wider social media listening strategy. It’s more reactive than social listening in that you’ll be mostly looking out for specific mentions of your brand so you can publicly respond to customer feedback, as opposed to considering the broader brand sentiment being expressed by your audience.
Why Is Social Media Monitoring Important?
Social media engagement has become a big part of the customer experience.
Both potential and existing customers will use social media platforms as a means to get in touch with your team — whether they have a question, a compliment, or a concern about your products and services.
By actively monitoring your social media mentions, you can:
- Engage with potential customers and answer their queries, potentially leading to conversions.
- Build brand reputation by demonstrating active engagement with your customers and followers.
Top Tips for Effective Social Media Monitoring
First, bring all of your online profiles - Facebook, X, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube - into one platform that allows you to monitor messages and mentions at scale.
From here, you'll be able to set up alerts that notify your comms team whenever your brand gets indirect or direct mentions. (Be sure to account for common misspellings, nicknames, and abbreviations).
With messages, comments, mentions and relevant online conversations from all social profiles displayed in one platform, your team will be much better equipped to handle queries, reviews, and complaints in a timely manner — helping you to leave a positive impression and build brand loyalty.
What is Social Media Listening?
Social media listening is what businesses do to understand audience sentiment. This can be towards certain products or services, specific messaging, the overall brand, direct competitors, or even to uncover the wider social issues that their audiences care about.
It involves tracking and monitoring specific keywords that are relevant to your brand.
Why Is Social Media Listening Important?
By tapping into the mindset of your primary audiences, social media listening enables you to uncover opportunities for development and improvement based on from-the-source data gathered in realtime.
By adopting a social media listening strategy, you’ll be able to:
- Better understand your target audience and the challenges they’re experiencing.
- Keep an eye on your competitors.
- Make changes to the products and services you offer based on real audience insights.
- Stay up to date with industry changes and identify trends.
Understand which topics your customers truly care about, and adjust your positioning accordingly.
Top Tips for Effective Social Media Listening
You don't have to invest a huge amount of time and resource into your social media listening strategy to see real results — especially if you're only just incorporating social media listening into your marketing plans.
Powerful social media listening tools can deliver meaningful insights based on actionable (and customisable) data whilst requiring minimal set-up, so you can soon get started with developing a deeper understanding of your audience demographics.
For example, you could review brand mentions on a specific platform, like Instagram, during a set time period, and see the hashtags, keywords, and related terms most often associated with your brand. Not only will this help you gauge customer sentiment, but you'll also be able to access this insight without having to set up complex search queries or rely on algorithmic triggers.
Listening to what your target audience is saying in the context of your brand mentions is a great start for your social listening strategy.
Key Differences Between Social Media Listening and Monitoring
While social media listening and monitoring often go hand in hand, there are a few key differences to keep in mind when incorporating these approaches into your broader marketing and PR strategies.
Micro Scale vs. Macro Scale
Social media monitoring involves encounters on the micro-scale, where you’ll be responding directly to individual customer comments and queries across the social platforms you're active on.
While this is an important part of maintaining your brand’s image and reputation, it won’t ultimately give you the valuable insights you need to make broader changes and unlock new audiences and opportunities. Those insights come with social media listening.
One Is Reactive, the Other Is Proactive
Social media monitoring is very much focused on the here and now. It encourages reactive, responsive engagement with your audience, which can help to address concerns and develop trust. Because of this, social media monitoring can sometimes feel like a fire-fighting exercise.
On the other hand, social media listening focuses on gathering data now that can inform future steps for your brand and business.
Social media listening supports the growth mindset, allowing you to understand audience sentiment and your own position in the market in relation to your competitors, so you can carve a clear and strategic path forward.
Manual vs. Automated
A key difference between social media monitoring and social media listening is in the ability (or inability) for the task to be automated with social listening tools. Social media monitoring is a hands-on, manual task that will require an individual or team to ensure every comment and mention is picked up, reviewed, and responded to.
In contrast, some social media listening tasks can be achieved with powerful automated tools, which work to gather the data you need to generate meaningful insights about your audience.
Which Should a Brand Invest in First: Monitoring or Listening?
In short, brands need both social media monitoring and listening to truly tap into their audience insights and make real impact with their marketing efforts.
Social media monitoring and social media listening both play an important role in creating and maintaining the image of your brand, so adopting a social media strategy that combines both approaches is key.
Social media monitoring allows you to be responsive to your audience and participate in relevant conversations, which is an important part of securing trust and longevity for your business.
Social media listening allows you to gather and analyse the data that will help you stay relevant with both existing and new audiences.
So, when moving forward with your marketing strategy, you should look to incorporate both social media monitoring and social media listening to get a more well-rounded picture of the audience you're communicating with.
Which Social Media Channels Should You Monitor and Listen To?
Not all social media channels are created equal, and it’s important to understand which platforms you’re likely to find your ideal audience on. Once you know where your customers are, you can then start tailoring your messaging and content for each relevant platform.
Thankfully, our dedicated social intelligence tool can integrate with various social media platforms, so you can uncover deep insights from all your online spaces in one intuitive dashboard.
To date, Facebook has more than 3 billion active users engaging with the platform on a daily basis, making it the largest social media platform globally.
Initially used to make online connections with friends, the platform has expanded to become an online space for users to engage with people, pages, and brands. In 2023, 37% of users reported making a purchase through Facebook, while 50% of users reported making a purchase after seeing a business’s story.
X (Formerly Twitter)
As of early 2024, X had an estimated worldwide user count of 429 million, with over 106 million based in the United States.
According to recent research, 75% of X users have used the platform to engage with a brand, with the top engagement intent being customer care. One-third of users also reported making a purchase after having a positive experience on the platform.
In April 2024, Instagram reported over 2 billion monthly active users, making it the third-highest-performing social media platform globally.
Recent research shows that over 150 million people use Instagram monthly to communicate directly with a business, while 83% of consumers say they use the platform to discover new products or services, and 62% say they’re more interested in a brand after seeing it in an Instagram story.
In December 2023, Reddit had 70 million active daily users, with almost half based in the United States.
Links drive the most engagement on the platform, especially video links, which generate the most upvotes. Redditors use the platform to discover new brands, websites, tools, and content related to their interests.
YouTube
YouTube is the second most visited website in the world, after Google. It’s also the second-largest search engine, with over 2.5 billion monthly active users visiting the site to engage with video content for education and entertainment.
YouTube ads have the potential to reach 1 in 3 humans on Earth, and over 40% of retail shoppers have bought products they’ve seen on YouTube.
Blogger
In 2024, blogs continue to provide audiences with answers to their search queries and in-depth information about specific topics of interest.
Google’s Blogger.com, a content management system, reported close to 35.9 million unique global visitors in March 2024. Whilst 95% of blog readers claim they rarely or never leave comments on blogs, 15% say they always read the comments that are there, so it’s important not to let this platform slip through the net when thinking about your social media monitoring and listening strategies.
Social Media Monitoring and Listening Tools
Social monitoring and listening can be a time-consuming and fruitless task if you’re not equipped with: a) a clear set of goals, and b) the right tools for the job.
Streem.Social is a comprehensive social intelligence tool that equips your comms team with deep social listening, analysis, and engagement capabilities, so you can uncover valuable insights to inform brand decisions, based on millions of comments and social media posts shared across multiple social platforms.
Uncover Key Audience Insights With Our Social Intelligence Tool
Ready to learn more? Book your demo at https://www.streem.com.au/social-listening/