People always talk about your brands on social media – whether you’re aware of it or not. Customers are constantly providing companies with valuable data about what they need and want from an organization’s brand. It is a business’ responsibility to be there to collect this data and respond. There are two main ways to do this: social monitoring and social listening. Both are crucial, but they have their major differences. 

Social Monitoring vs. Social Listening

Social listening is the process of monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitors, product, and more. It gives brands an opportunity to track, analyze, and respond to conversations about them on social media. It’s a crucial component of audience research.

Social monitoring is identifying and responding to individual brand mentions on social media.

A business might use social media monitoring for many different reasons—to find great content to curate for your audience, to keep an eye on your competitors in their industry, to provide excellent customer service, to look for opportunities to grow and improve their products or service, or all of the above! The simple truth about both social listening and social monitoring is that knowledge creates opportunities.

It’s important to understand what monitoring and listening can do for a brand – individually and together. Only then can a company execute them properly and use them to better engage their consumers.

Tips to Stay On Top of Social

Know Your Why When You’re Monitoring

Social listening is used in many spaces, including the following: customer service, getting customer feedback, and more.

Can you use it for all of the above? Of course! This is just a reminder that it’s a good idea to have a variety of established strategies or you may find yourself getting overwhelmed and confused by all the data.

Decide why you’re monitoring first!

Set Attainable SMART Goals for Social Monitoring

This directly correlates to why you’re monitoring in the first place. Is your project about generating leads? Servicing customers? Building social media presence? Improving your reputation?

How do you plan to measure success?

If you want to protect your reputation and 20% of your current social media monitoring results (monitoring yourself + your company) are negative, then your goal may be to lower that down to 10%. Establishing a SMART goal is essential in all your social monitoring efforts.

Monitor Competitors and Negative Keywords Also

Besides the usual suspects above, look beyond keywords about yourself and your company. Monitor your competitors and negative terms to identify opportunities where you could provide assistance.

Check for Spelling and Punctuation

You may be a good speller but that’s not necessarily true for your audience. Check for spelling and punctuation, and include incorrectly spelled keywords as well as the correctly spelled keywords AND popular nicknames.

Lee McNiel