2022-04-01 | 989 Print PDF
Social media has become a vital monitoring and listening tool for brands and companies alike to help them track their brand mentions and gain insight on related trends affecting their product/services both negatively and positively. When it comes to social media listening and social media monitoring most marketers do not understand the difference between these two terms as both are mostly used interchangeably, so today I will like to explain what makes them unique from each other even though they are both correlated. Thanks to these two definite aspects of social media marketing we now have better responses from brands and companies, to easily hone up on their mistakes and responsibilities, it goes a long way in reputation management as well.
Recommended Read: What is online reputation management
This is the use of social media listening tools or platforms to collate data from interactions and engagements about a brand, topic, artist, or any subject of relevance via the use of social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, etc. It is a social media measurement metric for analyzing popularity indexes and analyzing sentimental opinions on tracked brands, topics, etc.
A case study done by Gartner survey reported that just over 51% of marketing leaders worldwide utilize it, meaning most brands are yet to evaluate how they process their brand's social media marketing power to understand the behavioral change in product trends from a consumer base point of view.
Social media listening tools provide you with the way your customers and potential prospects think about your product or services by analyzing mentions of what they say that are pertinent to your product/services and brand. The same can be applied to understand their perception of your competitor's businesses as well. This is incredible market research insight ready available data in real-time—as long as you know how to decipher the information.
Social Media Monitoring is the first stage of social listening and it is the method of brands tracking and monitoring their brands or company's mention online via reviews or hashtags. Social media monitoring is all about collecting data in relation to the targetted keyword search phrase, for brands and businesses, it can be used to provide online customer service in real-time against measuring the online reputation of a brand in terms of social listening.
With this meaning and definition of what social media mention and social media listening are, we can now take a unique look at what sets them apart from each other, what is the difference between social media monitoring and social media listening?.
The most obvious difference between this two can be clearly seen in the way they operate and provide value to each other. Although they may seem similar, social monitoring and social listening are not synonymous but rather symbiotic with the latter being the primary factor. As mentioned previously, social monitoring is the foundation for social listening. The data collected through the process of monitoring keywords of interest is what enables the process of social listening. Thus we can work around the deciphering of the collated data from our tracked mentions to get a better insight understanding of the trend of pertinent keywords that are related to our businesses.
There is no technical know-how when it comes to using social mentioning and social listening tools, all you need to have is a strategic plan of what you need to monitor and listen to, this is an effective way to gather your user or customer dynamics, start to speak their language and create adverts that are centric to your audience on social media for better conversion rates.
We are working on such Social Media Listening tool, under our blog curator tool, we call the "Web Mention Tool", the tool offers better insight into social opinion and sentiments on keyword topics, brands, politics, etc. so that content creators can harness the best topic to write or blog on that will gain them traction, same can be used by businesses to track their mentions and reviews online.
Below are some strategic steps to take when utilizing social media monitoring and social media listening in your social media marketing strategies.
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