When your social media highlights your business’ strengths, it is worth its weight in gold. Although many businesses now know the importance of having a social media presence, many do not yet have an effective strategy in place to monitor and manage that presence. The fact is, it’s not enough to create a profile, fill in your business information, and call it a day. To become a brand that stands out from your competitors, you’re going to need to take it further.
In this blog, we’ll go over the differences between social media monitoring and social media listening as well as the benefits of having an effective social media monitoring and listening strategy.
Social Media Monitoring vs Social Media Listening
Although the terms social media monitoring and social media listening are often used interchangeably, they are actually two different practices in social media management:
Social Media Monitoring
The practice of collecting your customer engagements (likes, mentions, hashtags, direct messages, etc.) from social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google Business Profile, etc. This can be done using both free and paid tools, or manually.
Social Media Listening
The practice of first analyzing the engagements gathered from social media monitoring as well as industry trends and then using that knowledge to better understand your customers’ needs and improve your social media campaign strategies.
Social media monitoring and listening are essential practices in digital marketing because, just in case you didn’t know, brand attitudes on social media can change at the drop of a hat. Failing to keep tabs on your social media is basically the equivalent of ignoring your business’s phone calls.
The Benefits of Social Media Monitoring & Listening
Social media monitoring and listening offer many benefits to businesses:
1. Provides Insight Into What You’re Doing Right and Wrong
Through interactions such as mentions, likes, reviews, post comments, and direct messages, businesses can see exactly what their customers think about their brand, products, and services. This feedback can then be used to create social media campaign strategies as well as improve your services and products. It’s a win-win!
2. Improves Customer Service and Builds Trust
Online customer service can make or break a company. You can show that your company values good customer service by responding promptly to all social media queries and comments (both good and bad), which in turn builds trust with your brand.
3. Helps You Identify Influencers to Partner With
By keeping tabs on your social media mentions, you may come across users with large followings talking about your brand. If this is the case, this is a great opportunity to reach out to those influencers and potentially partner with them for future social media campaigns.
4. Helps You Keep Up with Your Competitors
As we mentioned before, social media monitoring and listening aren’t just about keeping tabs on engagements with your own brand. It’s also about keeping tabs on what’s happening in your industry, and in particular, your competitors. Pay attention to what is working and isn’t working for your competitors so you can avoid the mistakes they make and improve upon your own social media campaigns.
5. Ensures More Effective Social Media Campaigns and Strategies
Good social media campaigns and strategies are backed by actual data. Through consistent social media monitoring and listening, you can utilize the data you gather to improve your current campaigns/strategies or create new ones.
Are you keeping tabs on your brand’s social media presence? Our team can help. Contact us today to learn more about our Social Media Marketing services.
