In this era of emerging technology, there is no chance of doing business or establishing one without any involvement in social media. Social media monitoring and listening both are unique techniques to view, measure and analyze your audience thus help your brand to improve customer relations and communication.

For social media monitoring to benefit your business, it is essential to learn the difference between monitoring and social listening. Social Media Monitoring is often confused with Social Media Listening, but actually each of them has its own place in the success of your campaign. Understanding the difference between social media monitoring and social media listening is critical to any social strategy. 

What is social media monitoring?

Social media monitoring refers to identifying and determining what is said about a brand, individual or product across the internet. It gives you a glimpse of what’s being said about your brand in real time, by gathering publicly available data and organizing it in a way that works to your advantage. 

What is social media listening?

Listening is the key to analyze what customers say when they talk about your brand. Listening helps extract insights from your brand mentions. It helps you understand why, where and how these conversations are happening, and what people think—not just when they’re tagging or mentioning your brand.

While monitoring answers all your WHATs, listening answers WHYs.

Why is Social Listening vital for your business?

Reputation is the only currency that matters in a business. Building a reputation and following it on social media is essential. If you are not doing it, then you’re missing something big. Without a social listening strategy, a company fails to sustain as it uncovers valuable insights by showing what customers think about your brand. It gives you an opportunity for active listening and thoughtful communication. If you don’t know what the audience wants, you will fail to connect with them, help them or influence them.

Simply put, Social listening keeps your brand aware of the bigger picture.  It helps you to create a positive brand reputation that is an essential motivator to encourage people to purchase your products and services. Almost every second person reviews the product or services online before purchasing it so listen carefully. 

Higlights

• Social media monitoring is based on metrics like engagement rate and number of mentions. Social listening looks beyond the numbers to consider the mood behind those social media posts. 
• Social listening is a two-part process, unlike social monitoring. Social monitoring merely does the former, keeping track of social media mentions and conversations.
• Social monitoring addresses customers on a micro scale, whereas social listening takes a macro look at how customers discuss your brand on social media
• Social monitoring is reactive, social listening is proactive.

Social monitoring and listening tools help you grow your online awareness. You can act on what’s being said about your company and in turn, reconnect with prospective customers using the same social channels.