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Social Monitoring and Social Listening: differences
Social monitoring and social listening are two essential tools to know the current state of your brand, business, or store and obtain information about what is said about it.
Both tools measure your work from the point of view of a social media manager, and both are related.
However, there are some differences between them that we will reveal in this post and are important to know when preparing your strategy.
Social monitoring
Social Monitoring is a tool to respond to messages from users who speak and think about your brand: answer questions, interact with users who write something about your product, or like their message.
You can also use it to analyze the campaigns through the different metrics you can obtain: likes, comments, shares.
Social listening
Social Listening collects data and information about what other users say and think about your brand so that you can use it in your favor.
This listening allows you to know what users think of you, having first-hand information to improve your product or service, preventing your reputation from being damaged, or rethinking the strategy you are using.
Once both strategies have been defined, what are the differences between them?
We will tell you.
Differences between social monitoring and social listening
Both social monitoring and social listening are essential tools to know your brand’s situation and improve it.
What differentiates them?
Small and large scale
Social monitoring communicates with users to answer questions, send congratulatory messages or attend to issues that have arisen, a task that the company’s community manager usually carries out.
For its part, social listening covers a large scale, collecting data obtained from social monitoring such as user opinions, messages received about product reviews, etc.
Thus, with social listening, all the data is collected, and a strategy is prepared to address problems, avoiding falling into a bad reputation for the brand.
Proactive communication
The way you act is also a key difference between these two strategies.
In social monitoring, the company responds to the user’s doubts and queries who has previously taken the first step by mentioning the brand. This means that the brand has a reactive attitude to user questions and tries to resolve all the issues as they arise.
For its part, in social listening, the company collects this information from various users and takes the initiative, and acts proactively to design a long-term strategy that anticipates these problems and doubts so that they do not happen again.
💡 For instance:
Imagine that you have sold a product, and several users say on social networks that they did not like the packaging.
Social monitoring allows you to address the problem immediately by responding to users and thank them for their feedback. With social listening, you see the problem and try to put a strategy in place, acknowledging that there might be a problem with the packaging and room for improvement.
Manual and automated
One of the significant differences is the way of collecting the information.
Luckily, thanks to the notifications from the different social networks, social monitoring can be done manually.
Actually, with Metricool, you can reply to private messages and comments from social networks without leaving the app.
On the other side, Social listening does need an automated tool to find information about what users say about you on social media: keyword tracking, indirect mentions of your company, etc.
As you can see, both strategies help you measure and track what users say about you in the digital world. Therefore, you should consider both to improve the position of your brand.