Empower my brand
Empower my brand

Social Listening vs. Social Monitoring

“Your brand name is only as good as your reputation”

The tricky thing about brand reputation is that it is difficult to achieve but extremely easy to lose. People are not complacent about receiving average services anymore. They turn instantly to online review boards and social media to let the world know about their negative experience. This could easily affect or ruin your brand reputation unless capitalized upon by using social intelligence tools like social media monitoring and social listening.

Online Reputation Social MonitoringA study by Dimensional Research claims “90% of customers say buying decisions are influenced by online reviews” and 86% customers confirm that their buying decision is influenced by negative reviews. By listening to and monitoring all the chatter related to your brand, you could save your brand’s reputation through timely action and responses.

Social listening and monitoring can provide you with the business intelligence required to manage and protect your brand’s reputation. But let’s first distinguish between Social Listening vs. Social Monitoring.

How is Social Listening Different from Social Monitoring?

Social media monitoring and social media listening are often used interchangeably. And though, they mean almost the same, there is a subtle difference between the two.

“Data is not information” yet “Information is just bits of data”

Social listening and monitoring revolve around the notions of data and information. Social monitoring is essentially nothing but the data that you collect from social media, social listening yields the actual information.

Puzzle analogy for Social Monitoring vs Social ListeningSocial media monitoring presents you with all the bits and pieces of an unsolved jigsaw puzzle, but social listening joins every piece at the right place to give you a complete picture. Simply put, social media monitoring can be called a subset of social media listening.

Social monitoring includes searching for and gathering data from review boards, social media sites, and messenger forums.

Social listening helps you analyze the data collected, defines your future course of action and plans in accordance with the insights obtained.

Why Use Social Listening and Social Monitoring?

In a rapidly urbanizing world, the number of internet users is constantly increasing. It is essential to keep listening to the concerns of your customers and respond to them before they turn into a pain point.

Your social media efforts might be doing great on the surface but mere likes do not reflect real success. Let’s look at some of the key reasons why gauging the chatter is beneficial:

  • Online Feedback (positive/negative) helps you to know how your customers perceive your products and services
  • Audience Engagement is possible, when we have feedback, whether positive or negative
  • Brand Advocates can be found among the customers who provide positive feedback to spread a positive impression about our brand
  • Proactive Customer Support is possible in real time if we respond to the issues and concerns of customers
  • Competitor Analysis is possible as we see where they stand with their customers and learn about the reasons behind the popularity of their products and services
  • Lead Generation is possible by establishing a positive connection with existing as well as potential customers.

These insights are highly valuable to a brand manager, as they proactively manage their online reputation.

How can Social Media Listening and Monitoring Help You?

Remember we said social listening helps yield information from the data collected through social monitoring?

Target and planning Social monitoring vs social listeningThis information can help you design an effective action plan to manage your online reputation and to strategize about other functions of your business too! When there is a considerable amount of negative chatter about your customer service, most of them would mention the reason for it. It could be due to long response time, unsatisfactory response or even a rude or uncaring attitude. It can help you chalk out a plan for changing the processes of your customer service department.

Social monitoring measures the scope of future marketing needs. You can gauge the reach your brand has on social media and know how many users are talking about you. This knowledge can help you design future marketing strategies and campaigns.

Business intelligence and social media listening are almost synonymous today. Gain insights into customer satisfaction and react proactively in real time to build a solid online reputation, without incurring huge costs.

Business Insights using Social Intelligence

Innovations made possible by technology are a way of life today, helping to improve the way we do business. A great example would be how artificial, and social intelligence is helping us to gain advanced insights into customer preferences.

Customer insights for social Intelligence

Social Intelligence, also known as social media intelligence, is a collection of tools which gather analytical information from open sources or closed social networks, using a combination of intrusive and non-intrusive methods.

Social Intelligence for Business Learning

Managers continuously search for genuine insights which would help them design products that resonate well with their customers. Social listening provides great insights which help them gain such business intelligence.

To illustrate, let’s see how Barclays realized the real value of social listening when they launched their banking application PingIt. Real-time customer insights helped Barclays gauge customer preferences and make critical changes to their application. Sentiment analysis of the data collected from social media showed that there was some negative chatter building around the lack of banking provisions for teenagers (under 18s) in the app. Responding quickly to the customer feedback, Barclays added the missing feature within a week.

Barclays PingIt was downloaded more than 120000 times in just 5 days.

Layers of Social Intelligence

There is an ever-growing number of companies willing to invest in and try social intelligence. However, the term has been loosely used and has left much confusion in its wake.

Social intelligence is often confused with social listening and social monitoring. Though they fall under the same umbrella, each one is different and unique in its own way. Social listening and social monitoring are tools we use to gain social intelligence.

Social intelligence is about gaining a thorough understanding of the available social data. It has many layers which make the overall analysis easy and flexible.

Social Monitoring and listening

Social monitoring and listening help assimilate the data from all the built-up chatter.

The chatter collected can house historical data about your brand, search queries, social media comments or conversations, and review board entries etcetera. The source of data also determines the quality of the data and the final analysis in turn.

Social Listening

Data Management

Often, the social data collected is unstructured. Data management aids appropriate filtration and segmentation which makes it worthy of further investigation. Sometimes, a brand with a generic name (say, a brand called lemon), can draw in a lot of non-relevant chatter, but data management helps to weed out the unnecessary bits.

The usual filters include:

Time specific: Data ranging from a few minutes to a few years

Geography: Data from specific geographical areas

Media type: The source of the data – Facebook/ Twitter/ Instagram/ Google reviews

Sentiment: Positive, negative or neutral

Advanced Analysis

Advanced analytics takes care of anything that goes beyond the scope of data management. Businesses seek actionable insights which can be translated directly into a corrective strategy.

Using advanced analytics like Boolean processing, you can bridge the gap between an action and its outcome. Social listening enables you to draw relevant mentions and conversations while data management helps filter it. Analytics, on the other hand, translates the meaning of the conversation extracting the most key perceptions.

Distribution

Social intelligence has evolved dramatically over the years. Analytics is no more limited to a dashboard, with options for customizations. Real-time insights also come in the form of reports, alerts and command centers.  When choosing a social intelligence platform, its ability to deliver actionable insights is the desired feature, for companies.

The analysis of relevant social media chatter and the references drawn from it can help your business outperform your competition in a hundred ways. Social media intelligence helps you deliver on that promise by making your business evolve furthermore.