“The customer is always right” is a well-known phrase in business. However, listening to the customer and finding out ‘what is right’ for business isn’t always easy. Having a strategy in place to track, analyze, and respond to conversations about your brand and industry online is a key component of audience research.
Learning what your customers think about your brand, and what customers are saying about your competitors, are critical components to the growth and success of your business.
Social media monitoring and social media listening are two ways businesses can learn from their customers. So, what is the difference between social media monitoring and social media listening? Our experts at Pivotal New Media, have outlined the differences below.
Social Media Monitoring
Social media is filled with information and constant conversation, which makes it the perfect tool for companies to conduct research. However, it can seem overwhelming and hard to find the information that matters most. That’s where social media monitoring comes in!
Social media monitoring uses social media to find information relevant to your business. It allows you to:
- Track and respond to brand mentions
- Insert your brand into conversations
- Follow hashtags and trends that relate to your business
- Monitor your competition
Businesses can monitor their brand on social to see what is being said about them. This allows for the opportunity to respond to specific customer complaints, show customers you appreciate their positive reviews, and begin to build one on one relationships. These interactions and relationships can allow for follower conversion to brand advocates.
Following business trends through monitoring provides insights that allow you to not only promote your business but opens the opportunity for your business to become a resource to these social communities. Using monitoring to insert your business into topic specific conversations, establishes your business as a thought leader in the field.
Social Media Listening
Social media listening is about analyzing the information and data collected in social media conversations and looking for ways to put what you’ve learned into action. This ‘action’ is what makes social media listening different from social media monitoring.
Social media monitoring is all about being aware of your brand’s mentions, joining the conversation, and impacting customer service. Whereas social media listening takes a broader look at the overall conversations to consider who are the people discussing your brand and how they feel about your brand, industry, or hot topics. Understanding the who, what, where, and how about the people and conversations you’re analyzing will help your business with its overall social media marketing and product development. Social Media is the world’s largest focus group.
The process of social media listening gives insights beyond brand mentions and takes a deeper look at the data to help craft and alter strategy. The main thing to understand with social media listening, is that it uses analytics to guide the strategy and the day-to-day actions for your business.
It’s also important to note that social media listening isn’t just for insights on your brand, but also provides insights about your competition, the overall industry, and trends aligned with your business. This gives you important insights into where you fit in the marketplace and how you can grow.
Social media listening is part of the lifeblood that feeds a digital strategy. Results from social media listening affects overall business operations, product development, and customer service.
What’s the difference?
Basically, social media monitoring is about scanning social media for mentions about your brand and social media listening is about taking a deeper dive into that data to strategically plan for your business future.
Social media monitoring uses social media to find information relevant to your business and allows you to track your brand, audience, and competitors. It allows you to build one on one relationships and insert your business into social conversations.
Social media listening is more active and strategic, it involves analyzing the data for actionable insights. Social media listening uses data to improve your overall social media marketing strategy.
Our experts at Pivotal New Media would like to help you integrate social media insights into your marketing strategy and help you achieve your business goals. Contact us today!
