There are many different areas of digital marketing that require attention from teams. 

A large area of this landscape is social media. Social media marketing requires an incredible amount of time and effort from team members in order to successfully manage and run a social media program. 

Two terms commonly used in social media marketing are social monitoring and social listening. 

Both of these phrases are used to refer to types of social media strategies, and they are often used interchangeably. 

However, social monitoring and social listening are both distinct approaches and should be addressed as separate entities. 

In this article, we’ll take a look at what social monitoring and social listening are, and why they are important for your digital marketing strategy. 

Then we’ll take a look to see which approach will be the best fit for your team and learn how you can use it in your own social media marketing strategies today.

Social Monitoring vs Social Listening: What’s the Difference?

As discussed above, social monitoring and social listening are different strategies that are, unfortunately, often used as interchangeable terms. 

While there are differences in the definitions, there are also a few key factors in which social monitoring and social listening impact your social media strategies in separate ways.

1. Reactive vs Proactive

The first key difference between social monitoring and social listening is in the types of actions they take. 

Social monitoring is a reactive activity that is all about quick responses and fast, personalized messages. 

This is important because it helps to create those valuable connections with customers, but doesn’t ultimately require any long-term strategy or thought-out approach. 

Social listening, on the other hand, is a proactive activity as it requires you to take a step back and think through the implications behind brand perceptions and overall brand sentiments. 

As a proactive strategy, social listening also requires self-initiation to enact the strategies you develop rather than a quick-fire response to someone else’s action.

2. Narrow vs Broad

Social monitoring is a very narrow approach to social media management. 

The responses you give and interactions you monitor aren’t part of a larger approach, but are representative of an individual’s thoughts posted on social media. 

Even outside of one-on-one interactions, monitoring your brand or campaign through mentions is also a narrow approach to social media marketing. 

Social listening provides a broader take on your place in the industry or market landscape by looking at the big picture rather than individual opinions or campaign results. 

Listening by definition requires you and your team to try and think beyond the immediate mentions and find a broader understanding of your brand’s reputation on social media platforms.

Sometimes brands underestimate just how much noise their audience can generate. If you scroll past brand mentions without questioning recurring themes—yep, even the weird complaints or oddly specific praise—there’s a whole layer of insight slipping through the cracks. Social listening encourages a bit of patience (and maybe a thicker skin) because it’s not just about the best or worst comments. It’s about piecing together those subtle trends hiding in the everyday chatter. Suddenly, out of all those posts, patterns about your brand’s perception or stumbling blocks start to show themselves.

When teams take time for social listening, they’re also preparing themselves for the curveballs that rarely show up in one-off messages. For instance, maybe you notice a low-level hum of frustration about a feature you hardly consider, or a groundswell of enthusiasm for something small that could be turned into a bigger marketing push. If you’re just monitoring, you’ll be stuck on surface-level customer care stuff—a reply here, a thanks there. Listening pulls you up for a bird’s-eye view and, weirdly, makes the whole job feel a little more strategic (and, if we’re honest, interesting too).

3. Manual vs Automated

Another key difference between social monitoring and social listening is the methods in which the two strategies are completed. 

Social monitoring is a very manual approach. It requires team members to set notifications or search through hashtags and profiles to find specific brand mentions. 

While there are tools to help your team catch brand mentions as they happen, the process of responding and monitoring on an individual or micro level still has to come from a manual process. 

This is why social monitoring often takes the time and effort of multiple team members or even entire departments to manage for brands. 

In contrast, social listening can use marketing tools like AI and social media reporting tools to help identify trends and parse through large data sets to find insights into your brand. 

These types of tools help marketers by presenting data in helpful ways that can’t be reached through human observance. 

In fact, it’s nearly impossible to correctly manage social listening without the power of AI and automated tools. 

With the help of tools, social listening becomes easier and uses automation rather than valuable time to make things easier for you and your team. 

Finding patterns, understanding broad implications within your audience, and uncovering key trends are much easier with the use of tools rather than your best guess.

4. Short-Term vs Long-Term

Social monitoring is often viewed as a very short-term strategy for managing social media marketing. 

After all, after the first interaction with an audience member, there typically isn’t any further communication. 

However, this approach does help brands meet customer demands. As the digital world continues to grow, customer expectations change as well. 

Most customers expect fast, if not immediate, responses to inquiries or direct messages through social media. 

The fast responses and quick replies from social monitoring meet those demands and keep your customers satisfied. 

Social listening is a more long-term approach to social media marketing and often takes place over days, months, or even longer periods of time. 

Because the focus is on trends and patterns rather than direct communication, you have time to strategize and think through social listening approaches.

Social Monitoring vs Social Listening: Which is Best for Your Brand?

Now that you understand that social monitoring and social listening are two different approaches rather than interchangeable terms, you might be wondering which is best for your brand. 

Social monitoring and social listening both target different business goals, so before you select an approach to focus on, you should spend some time thinking through your social media marketing programs and determining what your end goals are for the quarter or the year. 

➤ If your goals are to improve customer service by getting back to customers quickly and improving your brand’s reputation through interactions or to increase sales by driving your audience to specific landing pages or campaign touchpoints, then social monitoring is your best bet. 

➤ Social listening is a better approach if your goals are more in line with understanding general customer sentiments, identifying specific issues or problems with your brand’s products or services, improving standings against competitors, tracking awareness over different platforms, or gaining insights into industry trends.

Wrap Up

Social monitoring and social listening are used interchangeably by both marketers and those outside of the industry. 

However, the truth is that each approach needs to be treated as a separate strategy, since both terms refer to completely different approaches to social media marketing. 

A well-rounded social media strategy is likely going to include elements of both social listening and social monitoring. 

This allows you and your team to build fast connections and increase brand awareness through social monitoring while at the same time learning more insights that will affect your social media strategy planning through social listening.

If you are looking for more advice and insight on how to run your social media marketing strategy, take a look at our blog on social media strategies that improve engagement with your viewers!

You’ll learn key insights on how to put together a winning social media strategy and ways to create more engagements with your target audiences.

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