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 usa mobile database 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.