Social Media Monitoring vs Social Listening — How are they different?

Social Media Monitoring and Social Listening are two terms that sound rather similar and are often used interchangeably. There is, however, a simple but significant difference between them. 

The Purpose

The goal of Social Media Monitoring is to ensure that brands quickly respond whenever they are mentioned on social media. If the brand is mentioned in a positive light, they can amplify it. If there is any negative feedback, they can quickly control the damage to the brand image.

The purpose of Social Listening is to draw insights about public opinion of the brand and use those insights to make business decisions and strategies. Thus, while Social Media Monitoring is more comparable to a Customer Care function, Social Listening is more strategic and often used by decision-makers.

The Means

Businesses can deploy social media monitoring by tracking notifications manually and responding to  posts. Social Listening, however, is a much more complex and a larger scale undertaking. To analyze the public perception of your brand, you need to track, collect and measure all of your social media mentions —whether or not you are specifically tagged on the post. By tracking and analyzing keywords, mentions, and trends, around a brand, competition and industry, businesses can identify consumer opinions, needs, interests and preferences to build better experiences for their customer.

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