Why Your Brand Needs Social Media Listening and Social Media Monitoring
Social
Jul 27
Every brand needs a strategy in place to effectively connect with its customers. In an age flooded with personal devices and easy digital access, the opportunities to interact with users on a personal level are virtually endless. Companies looking to keep pace with their customers’ needs and remain involved in the conversations surrounding their products and industries need to incorporate strategic social media listening and monitoring practices.
Here’s what you need to know about social listening and monitoring — how the two differ, and the ways each can be used to keep your brand in touch with its customers.
How Listening and Monitoring Differ
Though sometimes used interchangeably, the terms do hold different meanings when it comes to strategic marketing practices. The oversimplified way to characterize the two is to consider social monitoring a reactive process that includes responding to mentions, keeping tabs on relevant hashtags, and generally staying informed as to how audiences are conversing about your brand and its products. Social listening is the opposite side of that coin — a big-picture, proactive approach to addressing customer needs to be based on data pulled from industry trends.
Both social listening and monitoring social channels can refer to keeping a close eye on how branded messages are being received and staying acutely aware of any chatter surrounding your industry or competitors.
Why You Need Both
When it comes to your brand’s digital marketing efforts, raw data doesn’t always paint a complete picture. While social listening data can tell a business whether or not its engagement metrics are on the rise, social monitoring can help explain why.
It’s worth noting even basic social monitoring has a demonstrable impact on purchasing decisions. According to Sprout Social, 83% of users like it when brands respond to questions, and 48% of customers ultimately make purchases with responsive brands on social media. Another survey revealed that 83% of consumers expect brands to respond to social media comments within a day or less. Unscripted, personable responses to user questions or concerns make customers feel heard and valued.
As for social listening — being a data-driven company is a well-documented path to success.
Every business can benefit from tailoring content to its audience. The combination of direct, positive interactions with customers through social monitoring and developing strategies and products based on social listening data allows brands to encourage better customer experiences — and see overall campaign performance rise.
Tools and Platforms That Can Help
Given that staying in tune with customers is such a crucial piece of every marketer’s playbook, there are unsurprisingly several tools to choose from in the social management space, with most combining social listening and monitoring tools into easy-to-use platforms.
A good social listening tool keeps you in the loop when it comes to your brand’s digital presence, and can unveil previously unknown customer pain points. You might have already heard about big names like HubSpot, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite as popular options for collecting and responding to brand mentions and feedback from customers’ social accounts. Other widely-used social management dashboards include Tweetdeck, Brandwatch, and Awario, which track brand mentions, backlinks or brand mentions without links.
Utilizing Social Media Listening and Social Media Monitoring in Your Campaigns
Acting on insights gained from the tools above and aligning brand social strategy with data gathered through good social listening and monitoring practices benefits every level of your digital marketing. Here’s how:
- Utilizing a social management dashboard helps your brand discover and develop more engaging content that resonates with wider audiences — and it can be done without experimenting with large ad campaign budgets.
- Closely monitoring brand name mentions, including product names, keywords, and common misspellings can cut down customer service complaints and give quick feedback when something in your site’s checkout process is broken or mishandled.
- Responding directly to feedback or concerns builds your brand reputation and strengthens customer loyalty.
Quick responses, actionable insights, and an ongoing rapport with engaged users are all major advantages stemming from active social listening and social monitoring. By keeping up with customer conversations and recognizing changes within industries as they occur, marketers will be better equipped to handle key shifts in customer needs.
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