The difference between 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 because social media monitoring tells you what people say about your brand or industry, and social media listening tells you why.

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

While social media listening could reveal that many of those mentions were 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 social 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’s 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 relevant conversations 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

Social media mentions provide vital business intelligence that can inform more strategic decision-making.

Monitoring is also essential to your brand’s communications pipeline. Your social media managers and customer care agents should own most of this interaction, acting as traffic controllers 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 message monitoring at scale. 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.

Our 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

Start with turn-key social listening 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 creating complex search queries or relying upon algorithmic sentiment triggers. Simply listening to what people say alongside your brand mentions is enough.

Once you have a baseline, then you can get more advanced. Expand your listening with solutions that give the total volume and help you recognize patterns, find trends and figure out share of voice in groups of keywords or queries.

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

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. But a comprehensive social monitoring and listening strategy needs a 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, you can focus on replying with appropriate responses.

In comparison, social listening is more analytical and strategic. Social listening tools offer in-depth insight into the context and sentiment behind what people are saying. Rather than simply responding to messages, listening shows you engagement patterns and trends for your brand and industry. This information enables you to set data-informed benchmarks and goals to make more strategic decisions. Social listening requires analyzing many different things to do this well, making it difficult to do it without an automated social listening tool.

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 this 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. Use Case Assignments to delegate messages to other team members and tags to keep all your messages organized. Plus, lean on our Message Spike Alerts to know when there’s a surge of @-mentions that need to be addressed, so you can avoid or address potential brand crises.

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 to 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.

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 measure emotional response around any topic.

Listen in on millions of conversations happening across Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, X, YouTube and the web about your brand or topics important to you. No need for boolean expertise, as we offer templates to help you build queries quickly. And with Recommend by AI Assist, generate keyword suggestions to help refine your Listening queries for richer insights. These capabilities enable you to easily keep a pulse on your brand’s health, track sentiment around events or analyze insights from your industry, competitors and campaigns.

Once you’ve refined your query, you’ll likely have a lot of information to sort through. Our Analyze by AI Assist helps you efficiently identify your Topic’s most significant Smart Categories, keywords, hashtags, emojis and mentions. It turns data into clear insights, helping you instantly cut through the noise so you’re spending less time on analysis and more on strategy. All while giving you the flexibility to go broad on trends or zoom into individual posts for qualitative insights.

The insights Sprout’s Listening provides can power your social and business strategy, so you’re ready for the future.

Get started with social monitoring and listening

Social monitoring and listening are excellent for tuning into 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.

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.