Social media monitoring vs. social media listening

What’s the difference between social media monitoring and social media listening? People often use these terms interchangeably, but they’re not quite the same.

To break it down:

• Social media monitoring involves tracking social media messages, comments and conversations directly related to your brand and responding to those engagements.
• Social media listening is the process of analyzing the full spectrum of conversations around your industry, brand, and any topics relevant to your brand to understand your audience better and improve your campaign strategy.

Ultimately, businesses need both social media monitoring and social listening because monitoring tells you what people say about your brand or industry, and listening tells you why.

For example, let’s say you lead marketing for an e-commerce brand, and you just launched a new product. Social media monitoring might show that many customers are discussing a particular product. These insights may indicate that the product is popular—in theory.

However, social media listening could reveal that many of those mentions are negative. Dig even deeper, and you might find that the issue isn’t even with the product but with shipping delays. While monitoring addresses the symptoms, listening reveals the root cause.

In this article, we’ll define social media monitoring and listening in depth and highlight the critical differences between the two.

Social media monitoring definition

Social media is a go-to channel for brands to connect with their audience. Social media monitoring is the first step towards powering these connections, helping brands find the conversations they should be aware of or participate in. It is the process of gathering useful social discussions and messages to keep track of customers’ likes, dislikes, wants and changing needs.

It allows you to track mentions of your:

• Brand name and common misspellings
• Product names and common misspellings
• Main competitors
• Product or brand in particular areas

Example of social media monitoring

Social media monitoring tracks the key phrases and terms important to your company and surfaces them for you to respond to.

For example, earlier this year, 100 Thieves, a lifestyle and gaming company, mentioned the footwear brand Crocs on X (formerly known as Twitter). Even though they didn’t tag the account, Crocs likely used social media monitoring to find the mention and respond promptly. 

The benefits of social media monitoring

By failing to monitor social media mentions—equivalent to ignoring the phone line—most brands miss vital business intelligence that could inform more strategic decision-making.

Monitoring is essential to your brand’s communications pipeline. Your social media managers and customer care agents should own most of this interaction, acting as air traffic control for what’s coming in across your social networks.

How to make the most of social media monitoring

First, centralize your social profiles into a single platform enabling scale message monitoring. Then, create alerts to help your agents easily track and respond to direct or indirect brand mentions. Include your brand’s handle and broader mentions. Also, account for common misspellings, nicknames, flagship products and industry-adjacent terms.

By receiving these alerts, your social team will be better able to block and tackle on your brand’s behalf, answering FAQs while routing other critical messages to different departments within your organization—from HR to sales.

To get even more sophisticated, your community managers can identify potential entry points to guide purchasing decisions. But be careful: This tactic is as much an art as a science.

Social media listening definition

Social media listening is about examining the conversations and trends around your brand and industry, and using those insights to make smarter marketing choices.

It helps you determine why, where and how these conversations are happening and what people think—not just when they tag or directly mention your brand.

Example of social media listening

Social media listening can help you plan better campaigns and improve your content strategy and messaging by removing the guesswork of what content will resonate. Analyzing metrics like volume, share of voice and sentiment will help reveal what offers are most popular with your audience and how they truly feel about your brand and products.

One social media listening example is when a franchise restaurant used Sprout’s Listening capabilities to see which food items their customers loved and which were getting overlooked.

The Listening Topic Themes data revealed some interesting patterns. While nachos weren’t mentioned as often as other food items, they had the highest percentage of positive mentions and the lowest percentage of negative mentions. So, the franchise decided to create more content about nachos because the data showed that customers really loved them.

The benefits of social media listening

Without social media listening, you might miss important industry trends and customer preferences, leading to missed improvement opportunities. Plus, while social media monitoring focuses on what’s being said and by who, listening helps businesses understand the overall sentiment and context of those conversations. Without it, companies might misinterpret customer feelings and feedback.

How to use social media listening for your business

Executing a social listening strategy may seem more complicated than day-to-day monitoring, but it doesn’t have to be. Start with turn-key solutions, then progress to more intricate techniques. Powerful, automated listening tools requiring minimal setup can deliver meaningful, actionable data as well as customizable ones.

For instance, you can look at how often your brand is mentioned on X during a certain time period, and which hashtags, keywords and related terms are often used. This can help you see how people feel about your brand, products and campaigns. All this is possible without fine-tuning complex search queries or relying upon algorithmic sentiment triggers. Simply listening to what people say alongside your brand mentions is enough.

Getting more advanced listening solutions that not only give the total volume but also help you recognize patterns, find trends and figure out share of voice in groups of keywords or queries can be very useful.

However you approach it, the goal is to reach clearly defined outcomes within your brand’s larger social strategy. If monitoring tactics result in enhanced engagement and listening efforts inform more strategic decision-making, you’re on your way to achieving success.

Key differences between social listening vs. social monitoring

If monitoring is the entry point, listening is the graduate degree. Most social media platforms offer basic, native monitoring capabilities. However, a comprehensive social monitoring and listening strategy requires a third-party tool like Sprout Social to track mentions and analyze data across multiple social media channels.

Here are a few more fundamental differences between social monitoring and social listening.

Micro vs. macro

Social media monitoring is micro. It’s focused on the details, like individual brand mentions or comments. In comparison, social media listening is macro. It’s about looking at the bigger picture and noticing how people talk about your brand, products, industry and competitors.

For example, monitoring would tell you thirty people directly tagged your brand in posts today. Listening would reveal that most of those mentions were either rave reviews about a new product or complaints about customer service.

Reactive vs. proactive

Social media monitoring is reactive. It involves observing and responding to direct mentions or tags as they happen. On the other hand, social media listening is proactive. It provides deeper insights that help you strategize and plan.

For example, while monitoring might alert you to a single customer complaint, listening can uncover a trend of complaints about a specific product feature, which can be fixed or optimized to prevent future issues.

Tactical vs. analytical

Social media monitoring is a more tactical, task-focused process. Many social media monitoring tools like Sprout Social collect all your mentions in one centralized place and notify you when there’s a new conversation. From there, it’s your job to respond to the message, either with a reaction, reply or direct message.

In comparison, social listening is more analytical and strategic. Social listening tools offer more in-depth insight into the context and sentiment behind what people are saying. Rather than simply responding to messages, listening allows you to see engagement patterns and trends for your brand and industry. This information enables you to set data-informed benchmarks and goals and make more strategic decisions. However, social listening requires analyzing many different things, so it’s impossible to do it without a social listening tool that can automate the process.

How to use Sprout Social for social monitoring and listening

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management tool with monitoring and listening capabilities. These solutions enable users to zoom in on meaningful conversations and zoom out to analyze the trends and patterns that inform their social media strategy.

How exactly? Let’s explore more in-depth.

Smart Inbox

The Smart Inbox is where you keep track of every conversation with and about your brand. It’s the essence of monitoring, helping you to centralize and foster authentic conversations with action in mind. Messages from your social channels are centralized into one feed to ensure you stay focused and never miss a message.

Brand Keywords

Brand Keywords help you capture more relevant conversations about your brand, industry or competition. This is a step towards listening as it enables you to track various topics beyond your brand. Brand Keywords are custom searches that run constantly and display results in your Smart Inbox, which you can interact with just like any other message. You’re still focused purely on messages to respond or offer support on a personal level.

If you aren’t actively searching for these types of messages, you may miss the chance to participate in important conversations.

Trends Report

The Trends Report automatically surfaces the most popular topics and hashtags about your brand. With the report, we sit squarely in the middle of our spectrum.

The X Trends Report shows the hashtags and topics trending across the mentions and replies for your connected profile(s). It also shows the people and brands that you most frequently talk about and get mentioned with your business. This capability enables you to zoom out on the conversation around your brand to identify trends around your business or campaigns.

Keyword Report

The Keyword Report reveals the share of volume for basic keywords related to your brand, competition and industry. The X Keyword report instantly uncovers trends in X traffic for any keyword, hashtag or complex search query across any date range. With this report, we will start wading into listening territory. No longer is the focus purely on individual messages. Instead, you are looking at bigger trends around specific keywords over time to see how well your campaign is doing, keep track of your market or find patterns in how keywords are used.

Sprout’s premium listening solutions

Sprout’s Listening solutions offer a window into an audience’s candid thoughts and feelings to uncover trends, reveal patterns and gauge emotional response around any topic. They offer data to support broader trends in popular topics, demographics and influencers while providing the flexibility to zoom into individual posts for qualitative insights.

The insights listening provides can power your social strategy, overall marketing and even business strategy. Understanding the “why” behind the “what” is a powerful thing that requires an equally powerful solution.

Get started with social monitoring and listening

Social monitoring and listening are excellent for tuning into the conversations around a brand and industry. But it also comes with a learning curve. From determining what hashtags and keywords to track to understanding how to interpret and act on the data in listening reports, it can initially be overwhelming.

However, our social listening guide is a great place to start. In just 90 minutes, you’ll get answers to questions about brand sentiment, trending discussions and content performance to optimize your content strategy.