Social media monitoring and social media hearing are terms that have been used interchangeably, but there is a difference.
- Social media monitoring = Caring for your customers simply by monitoring social media for messages straight related to your brand and addressing those messages appropriately.
- Social media listening = Understanding your audience plus improving campaign strategy by being able to access the full spectrum of conversation about your industry, brand, and any kind of topics relevant to your brand.
In essence, monitoring lets you know what , hearing tells you why .
Monitoring tackles the symptoms, and listening reveals the main cause.
Social media monitoring definition
Social media could be the #1 channel for brands who would like to connect with their audience.
Social monitoring is the first stage towards powering these connections, assisting brands in finding conversations they can become a part of.
That’s why social media monitoring is so essential.
On social, you are able to monitor…
- Your brand name and common misspellings.
- Your product names and common misspellings.
- Mentions of your main competitor.
- People searching products in the area your serve.
Example:
Let’s say your brand is Best Yoga Pants on the Planet Inc. You want to know what people are saying about your brand, not just if they tag you on social, but when they mention you in any capacity
Social media monitoring tracks the key terms and phrases important to your company and surfaces them for you to respond to.
This can also include that brand new Cool Yoga Tank that your brand name released.
And it can range from an upcoming event you’re likely to attend, running or just attending. Like the Greatest Yoga Conference in the World.
By failing to monitor social media mentions — equivalent to ignoring the phone line— many brands leave behind important business intelligence that could inform more strategic decision-making.
Monitoring therefore is important to your brand’s communications pipeline. Your social media managers and customer service agents should own most of this interaction, essentially playing air traffic control to what’s being released across your social networks.
To ensure your social team is on the road to success, consider a two-pronged approach. First, centralize your social profiles into one platform that enables message monitoring with scale. Then create alerts to help keep your agents apprised of situations where your brand is being discussed (either directly or indirectly). The brand’s handle and broader mentions. Also, account for common misspellings, nicknames, flagship products, and industry-adjacent terms.
By getting these alerts, your social media department will be better able to block and tackle on your brand’ s behalf, answering FAQs while routing various other critical messages to different departments in your organization, from HR to product sales.
To get even more advanced, your community managers can also determine potential entry points to guide purchasing decisions. But be careful: This tactic is really as much an art as it is a technology.
Social media listening description
Description:
Social media listening refers to analyzing the discussions and trends happening not just about your brand, but around your industry as a whole, and using that information to make better marketing decisions.
Social media listening helps you discover why, where and how these conversations are happening, and what people think— not only when they’re tagging or mentioning your brand.
This helps you form future promotions, improve content strategy and messaging, outpace your competition, construct an effective changer program and even build more impactful brand partnerships.
Monitoring is the entry point. Listening is the graduate degree. While brand names can certainly hunt and peck to interact in the most basic monitoring on nativ platforms, a comprehensive social listening technique absolutely requires a third-party tool to assess large volumes of data. Said another way: While you can look at trees and shrubs one by one at the ground level, you need a helicopter to scan the whole forest.
Executing a social hearing strategy may seem more difficult than daily monitoring, but it doesn’t need to be. Start with turn-key solutions, then move on to more intricate techniques. Effective, automated listening tools that require minimum setup can deliver just as significant actionable data as customizable types.
For example , analyzing your brand’s @mentions on Twitter within a given timeframe and appearing frequently mentioned hashtags, keywords, plus associated terms can help you gauge sentiment and understand what people say regarding your brand, products, and strategies. All this is possible without fine-tuning complicated search queries or relying on algorithmic sentiment triggers. Just simply hearing what is being said alongside your own brand mentions is enough.
On the more advanced side, listening options that not only return aggregate quantity but also aid pattern recognition, reveal trends, and calculate share associated with voice among groups of keywords or even queries can provide tremendous value.
However you approach it, the goal is to reach clearly defined final results within your brand’s larger interpersonal strategy. If monitoring tactics lead to enhanced engagement and listening attempts to inform more strategic decision-making, you’re well on your way to achieving unquestionable success.
This article was initially published on SproutSocial.com. Go and check out their Listening Solutions as well as Social Management, Social Marketing, Customer Care, Employee Advocacy, and Data and Intelligence
