In the fast-paced world of social media, waiting for users to @mention your brand before you join the conversation means you’re missing opportunities every day.

Customers refer to your brand without tagging your official handle, whether that’s through name variations, product mentions, or hashtags. Tracking these conversations across multiple channels is simple enough with social media listening and critical for tapping into social media’s full power.

Social monitoring strengthens your customer service strategy through faster response times, crisis prevention and brand advocate identification. A successful social media monitoring strategy streamlines all mentions and search parameters in one place, letting you focus on responding to important messages and developing data-driven strategies.

What is social media monitoring?

Social media monitoring is the process of tracking and responding to brand mentions, conversations and feedback across social platforms in real time. This includes direct mentions, untagged posts, reviews, comments and messages about your brand, products or industry.

Card defining social media monitoring. It says Social media monitoring is the process of gathering useful social conversations and messages to keep track of your customers' likes, dislikes, wants and changing needs.

Social media monitoring and social listening are not the same. They’re distinct practices with different benefits, though they often pair up in an overall strategy.

Social media monitoring tells you the what, while social listening gives you the why.

With monitoring, you respond directly to customers, solve issues, and participate in conversations specific to your brand. Social listening, on the other hand, involves the big-picture view of your industry and brand at large, including your audience’s tangential interests.

Social media monitoring isn’t just about direct mentions or comments on your posts. It includes posts that mention your brand without tagging you.

A diagram comparing social monitoring and social listening. Social monitoring is shown as a series of steps from gathering data to analyzing and extracting insights. Social listening is shown as a series of steps from gathering insights to driving proactive decisions.

Benefits of social media monitoring

Social media monitoring helps you discover relevant brand conversations and insights you wouldn’t otherwise. With the right tools, you get these insights in real time to manage crises, find new influencers and brand loyalists and know your customer better.

Social media monitoring delivers measurable business impact:

  • Crisis prevention: Detect issues before they escalate into major problems
  • Customer insights: Understand sentiment and preferences in real time
  • Brand awareness: Increase visibility through proactive engagement
  • Influencer discovery: Find brand advocates and partnership opportunities
  • Campaign intelligence: Gather unfiltered feedback on your marketing efforts

Boost brand awareness

When you track customer conversations, you respond to their needs immediately. This proactive engagement increases brand awareness to potential customers.

Brands that interact with posts, especially untagged mentions, create stronger recall than those pushing ads alone. Our most recent Sprout Social Index™ report found that 73% of social media users expect brands to respond within 24 hours.

Understand audience sentiment

Social monitoring makes sure you always know what your audience thinks and feels. Sentiment can change quickly and be affected by small moments.

Based on context in a particular conversation, you can glean insight into why sentiment about your brand is the way it is. Social monitoring gives you a timely in-depth framework for what is driving customer sentiment.

Maximize social media campaign insights

Social campaigns require creative thinking and tactical work to be successful. Social monitoring strengthens your campaign reporting and gives you additional information you won’t get from analytics alone.

Customers post reactions to campaigns and candidly share their thoughts, adding qualitative context to your collected insights.

In this example, a travel influencer shared a video tour of a luxurious Airbnb location they stayed at in Joshua Tree, California, calling it a “hidden gem.” The post shows the benefits of booking this Airbnb-hosted rental, and gives the company a chance to see how a sizable influencer references Airbnb without sponsorship.

The post tags the company that owns the rental, but does not tag Airbnb’s official account. So, you’d need to collect this information through social media monitoring.

Address social media crises quickly

Every brand faces negative situations such as customer complaints, product issues, or security breaches. Social media monitoring gives you the early warning system you need to address problems before they become crises.

Your social media strategy needs to be properly set up at the start to successfully weather a crisis. Being able to see conversations about the issue in real time helps you answer individual posts and overall public statements.

Find new influencers to partner with

Some of the best brand advocates may be macro and micro influencers you just haven’t come across yet. Social monitoring can help you find the right influencers and reach out about potential partnerships.

In the below post, SRAM Road was tagged in the caption, and the whole post is a positive review from a biking micro-influencer. If they didn’t know of this influencer before, they do now and can keep them in mind for future marketing campaigns.

Best practices for social media monitoring

An effective social media monitoring strategy starts with planning. You’ll need to set clear goals upfront to get the most benefit, which includes selecting relevant monitoring metrics to track.

Here’s a look at how to get started and lay a strong foundation for your monitoring program.

Set clear goals and objectives

Set goals and objectives upfront for a positive social monitoring experience. What do you hope to gain, and what metrics do you want to impact?

For example, you may want to better understand customer sentiment and improve it. Making sure you have the right tools in place supports the goals and objectives you set.

Choose the right social media monitoring tools

There’s no shortage of social monitoring tools on the market, but not all will fit what you need. Get a good sense of what tools you already have in place.

Keep in mind that a comprehensive platform saves you a headache, as it’ll cover multiple areas of your strategy.

Sprout Social's Smart Inbox is an inbox within the platform that consolidates all incoming messages and mentions into one place.

For example, Sprout Social keeps track of mentions and metrics across Instagram, X, Facebook TikTok and more. Insights are housed in one platform, making it easy to navigate.

Monitor relevant keywords for your brand

Draft a keyword list for your social monitoring tools to track. This should include your brand name and variations of it.

Add in product names, competitor brands and industry-specific terminology customers may mention alongside discussions with your organization. Regularly update this list based on what your monitoring efforts discover.

Monitor across all platforms

Focus your social media presence on platforms where your audience is most active.

Yet, when it comes to monitoring, it’s best to keep track of all platforms, regardless of whether you have a brand account there. Customers can reference you anywhere, and sticking to your established channels can cause you to miss critical insights.

Responding to social media mentions

One of the key differences between social monitoring and social listening is the reactive nature. Don’t just collect and then hoard the social mentions you find—take action!

As part of your overall strategy, craft an approach for responding to posts you find, both positive and negative. Put authenticity at the forefront, and respond with purpose.

Analyze your social media monitoring

After setting up monitoring parameters and responding to messages, measure your results to ensure your efforts drive business impact.

Track your monitoring success with social media analytics tied to your original goals.

Measure sentiment changes month-over-month to see if proactive responses improve brand perception. Adjust your response strategy based on what drives the strongest positive sentiment shifts.

Ultimately, your monitoring, listening and reporting strategies should all integrate and support one another.

How to use Sprout for social media monitoring

Sprout’s comprehensive social media monitoring capabilities can help you navigate through millions of social conversations in seconds. Here’s a brief guide to some key features.

The strongest element in Sprout’s toolkit of social media monitoring tools is the unified Smart Inbox. Instead of switching between networks, the Inbox helps you stay focused and reply to what matters.

Easily respond to an X (formerly known as Twitter) mention, an Instagram comment and a Facebook review through a single unified Dashboard. All your networks, brand keywords, search results and hashtag campaigns show up in the real-time Inbox.

To use Smart Inbox to its fullest extent, begin by adding Brand Keywords. These should include all of your regular mentions of your brand names and the misspellings.

Sprout Social's Smart Inbox with customer interactions.

If applicable, be sure your review sites, like Tripadvisor, are also connected. You don’t want to miss out on addressing customer reviews when they are only a quick connection away.

Sprout Social's listening tool gathering customer reviews from Tripadvisor for topic mining and sentiment analysis

Your social media monitoring solution should track these essential elements:

Once you have this all set up, the next step is responding quickly and with messages from the correct teams. With Sprout, automate assigning them to the appropriate team members depending on the content.

Sprout Social Smart Inbox Tag Support Monitoring Feature

Another great use of Tagging is to associate incoming or outgoing messages with a certain product launch, campaign or other initiative by your brand.

The Smart Inbox's Tagging feature associates incoming or outgoing messages with a certain product launch, campaign or other initiative by your brand.

Later on, these tagged messages can easily be pulled into Sprout’s analytics and provide the data that drives your monitoring reports. You can also go a step further to build listening queries that can inform your decisions on marketing and product development.

Sprout’s AI-enabled Social Listening capabilities are a great companion to the monitoring options. Easily build sophisticated listening queries and sort a high volume of collected data into understandable insights.

Monitor, listen, respond, repeat

Once you’ve aligned on your social media monitoring strategy, remember that these strategies often go in a cycle. Monitor so you know what’s being said, listen so you understand it, respond authentically and then do it all over again.

When choosing the right monitoring tool for your business, make sure it covers all the social networks you’re presently on, and hopefully, all in one space. With less back and forth between apps and browser tabs, you’ll be able to focus more clearly on the task at hand: social customer care and maximizing the value of your campaigns.

Are you ready to take on a social media monitoring strategy for your brand? Sign up for a free trial of Sprout Social today.

Social Media Monitoring FAQs

What are the 4 types of social media analytics?

The four types are descriptive (what happened), diagnostic (why it happened), predictive (what will happen), and prescriptive (what actions to take).

How often should I check my social media monitoring?

Check real-time for active conversations and customer service, but daily or weekly monitoring works for trend analysis.

What does social media monitoring refer to?

Social media monitoring is the process of collecting social conversations and messages to keep track of customers’ likes, dislikes, wants and changing needs. Social monitoring also includes responding to relevant conversations about your brand. This process is distinct from social listening.

Can I monitor competitors with social media monitoring tools?

Yes, monitoring competitors helps you benchmark performance, track their campaigns, and identify market opportu

What's the difference between social media monitoring and social media management?

Monitoring tracks and responds to conversations about your brand, while management encompasses your entire social presence including content creation and strategy.

How much should I expect to spend on social media monitoring?

Costs vary by tool scope and business needs, with comprehensive platforms often providing better value than standalone monitoring tools.