Social Media Monitoring vs Social Media Listening

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Not long ago, I was chatting with a business owner about measuring brand awareness on social media. “How do I know if my efforts are working?” she asked. “I feel like I’m doing okay, but I’m unsure how to track it.” She was not alone. Many companies struggle to understand how to measure brand awareness on social media.

Social media monitoring and listening are two strategies that can provide valuable insights to help you get a clearer picture of how your brand is doing. While they sound similar, they are vastly different. In this guide, we’ll break down the differences between social media monitoring and listening to help you understand how each can help you track brand awareness on social media.

Brandwise’s social media engagement software simplifies social media monitoring and listening so you can focus on what matters—improving brand awareness.

Social media monitoring tracks conversations, mentions, and interactions across social platforms in real time. This strategy helps businesses stay aware of what people say about their brand, competitors, industry, and products or services. While monitoring is often confused with social media listening, we’ll discuss their differences later. For now, it’s essential to understand that monitoring provides businesses with actionable data they can use to improve their social media presence and online reputation.

Social media monitoring focuses on four core elements: tracking brand mentions, monitoring competitor activity, real-time engagement, and sentiment analysis. Let’s look at each of these components in greater detail.

Tracking Brand Mentions

The first step in social media monitoring is to track brand mentions. This includes monitoring your brand name, hashtags, and keywords related to your products and services. For example, a coffee shop could track mentions of its new latte hashtag, #LatteLovers2025.

Monitoring Competitor Activity

Another crucial component of social media monitoring is keeping tabs on your competitors. Staying updated on what they’re doing—such as promotional campaigns and customer feedback—can provide insights for your improvement. For example, let’s say it’s the holiday season. You could observe how a rival’s holiday campaign resonates with its audience. This information can help you craft a better strategy for your seasonal marketing efforts.

Real-Time Engagement

Social media monitoring helps businesses engage with their audiences in real-time. Immediate responses to customer inquiries, complaints, or compliments foster trust and loyalty. For example, let’s say a customer tweets about a delayed delivery if the business apologizes and resolves the issue within minutes, that quick response can significantly improve the customer’s perception of the brand.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis in social media monitoring tracks audience tone and sentiment to determine whether mentions are positive, neutral, or negative. For example, let’s say a business identifies a spike in negative sentiment after a product launch. Tracking this information can help the business address concerns proactively and potentially prevent a PR crisis.

The value of social media monitoring extends beyond brand awareness. Here are some of the key benefits of monitoring your social media presence.

Customer Service Improvement

Social media monitoring helps businesses provide real-time customer support. For example, consider a customer commenting on a Facebook post asking about product availability. If the company responds quickly, it can drastically improve the customer experience.

Reputation Management

By catching negative mentions early, businesses can prevent potential PR crises. For instance, let’s say there’s a viral post criticizing a product feature. If the company monitors its social media presence, it can address the issue directly by engaging the customer rather than letting the story escalate.

Campaign Performance Tracking

Monitoring campaign hashtags and engagement metrics ensures the effectiveness of marketing efforts. For example, tracking the hashtag #EcoGreen2025 can help measure engagement during an environmental campaign.

Market Insights

Social media conversations often reveal customer preferences, trends, and potential market gaps. For instance, a business discovers demand for a product variant based on recurring requests in comments. This information can help them identify a market opportunity.

Social media monitoring is a straightforward process that involves setting objectives, using monitoring tools, analyzing data in real-time, and acting on insights.

Set Objectives

First, define what you want to monitor—brand mentions, competitor activities, or specific keywords. For example, a skincare brand may focus on tracking hashtags related to sensitive skin products.

Use Monitoring Tools

Next, social media monitoring tools can be used to automate the tracking process. For instance, Brandwise captures mentions across social platforms and uses AI to moderate comments and provide insightful analytics.

Analyze Data in Real Time

Once you start collecting data, use it to identify actionable trends and immediate issues. For example, a surge in questions about an upcoming sale could prompt the brand to post a clarification.

Act on Insights

Finally, act on the insights you gather from your social media monitoring efforts. This could mean responding to queries, resolving issues, or adapting strategies based on the data. For instance, if you notice frequent questions about shipping fees, a business could update its website to include precise details.

A social media monitoring strategy can improve customer relationships, enhance marketing strategies, and provide a competitive advantage. Let’s look at each of these benefits in more detail.

Real-Time Problem Solving

Quickly addressing customer complaints prevents negative reviews from escalating.

Improved Customer Relationships

Personalized and prompt responses build trust and loyalty.

Enhanced Marketing Strategies

Data gathered from monitoring can refine ad targeting, content creation, and campaign planning.

Competitive Advantage

Keeping tabs on competitors’ strategies allows businesses to stay ahead. For example, a company may learn of a rival’s weaknesses and capitalize on them to attract more customers.

Let's look at a hypothetical scenario to understand how social media monitoring works fully. A fashion retailer releases a limited-edition sneaker. Shortly after, they notice a spike in mentions. Using Brandwise, the team identified positive sentiments about the design and complaints about limited sizes. They quickly adjust their inventory strategy and issue a follow-up post announcing additional stock availability, enhancing customer satisfaction, and boosting sales.

How Does Social Media Monitoring Work

How to Find Unlinked Brand Mentions

How to Find Mentions on Instagram

Benefits of Social Media Monitoring

How to See Mentions on Facebook

How to Check Mentions on TikTok

Brand awareness on social media can heavily influence how well your business performs. For example, if your organization has low visibility on social media, potential customers may not even be aware of your existence when they need the products or services you offer. Instead, they will turn to your competitors with better social media presence. Improving brand awareness on social media can help reduce this dependency on competitors.

The higher your organization’s visibility, the more likely people will find your business when searching for information online. Social media listening can help you get there. This process involves more than monitoring direct mentions of your business on social platforms. Instead, it analyzes broader conversations around your brand, industry, and competitors to help inform strategic decision-making.

Social media listening goes beyond just monitoring mentions or direct interactions. It involves analyzing overall conversations, trends, and sentiments across platforms to extract insights for strategic decision-making.

Trend Analysis

Identify recurring themes or trending topics that align with or affect your industry—for example, A food brand tracking the rise of plant-based diets and adjusting its product offerings.

Customer Sentiment Insights

Assessing how customers feel about your brand, competitors, and the industry. For example, sentiment analysis tools can be used to discover customers' frustration with slow delivery times.

Competitor Benchmarking

Understanding how competitors are perceived and what customers expect from them. —for example, Analyzing competitor campaigns that generate high engagement to adopt similar strategies.

Identifying Emerging Needs

Listening to unmet customer demands or pain points to inspire innovation. —for example, A travel company learning that customers want more eco-friendly travel packages through ongoing social discussions.

Proactive Brand Positioning

Leveraging insights to shape public perception and craft narratives that resonate. For example, we are noticing an increased focus on sustainability and launching a campaign showcasing eco-friendly initiatives.

Improved Customer Experience

Businesses can refine their services and products by understanding customers’ concerns and needs. —for example, Learning that customers want more detailed product tutorials leads to creating engaging “how-to” video content.

Predicting Market Trends

Staying ahead of the competition by identifying new trends before they become mainstream. —Spotting conversations about a new social media platform and creating content tailored for that platform.

Crisis Management

Detecting early signs of dissatisfaction or negative buzz to mitigate potential PR crises. —Notice a spike in negative comments about a recent campaign and issue a public apology before the situation escalates.

Campaign Effectiveness

Evaluating how well a campaign resonated with the audience through qualitative and quantitative feedback. —For example, Track discussions about a new product launch to assess its impact and adjust marketing strategies.

Fostering Brand Advocacy

Identifying loyal customers and influencers who can amplify your brand’s message. —For example, Engage with users who frequently share positive feedback about your brand.

Identify Topics to Analyze

Focus on customer pain points, emerging trends, or competitor strategies. —for example,A tech company listening to discussions about AI-driven tools to discover potential collaboration opportunities.

Leverage Listening Tools

Platforms like Brandwise automate the process by scanning millions of conversations across various platforms and categorizing data into actionable insights.

Analyze Trends and Sentiment

Use visual data representations like charts or heatmaps to detect spikes in sentiment or mentions. —for example, Identifying a surge in positive mentions after launching a limited-time offer.

Develop Actionable Insights

Convert the findings into strategies that address customer needs or capitalize on trends. —Observing a demand for personalized services and rolling out a tailored rewards program.

Enhanced Customer Understanding

Gain a deeper insight into what customers want and how they feel about your industry. —For example, Identify that customers value faster delivery options.

Competitive Advantage

Anticipate and adapt to market trends more effectively than competitors. —Launch a product line before competitors based on trending customer preferences.

Optimized Marketing Strategies

Use audience insights to craft more targeted and impactful campaigns. —For example, Highlight sustainability efforts after noticing their popularity in social discussions.

Strengthened Brand Loyalty

Show customers that you’re listening and value their input by addressing concerns and meeting expectations. —Develop a new feature based on frequently discussed user pain points.

Data-Driven Decisions

Rely on comprehensive insights to guide business strategies and investments. —for example, Allocating more resources to a platform gaining popularity among your target audience.

A fitness brand notices a recurring conversation about mental health in fitness communities. By creating content and products that focus on the mental health benefits of exercise, they position themselves as a supportive and holistic fitness solution, increasing customer loyalty and engagement.

Talk About Brandwise

Brandwise is an intelligent social media management tool. At its core is an advanced AI that continuously learns and improves, automatically moderating comments on ads and posts while generating intelligent replies to comments and messages. This powerful tool streamlines workflow by consolidating social media interactions in one place and provides valuable AI-driven insights, identifying top FAQs and concerns to enhance customer engagement strategies.

For brands struggling with high-volume social media interactions, Brandwise offers an efficient solution to automatically hide negative comments, provide AI-generated responses, and gain a deeper understanding of customer engagement patterns. Try our social media engagement software for free for 7 days to grow your social media accounts rapidly!

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Key Differences Between Monitoring and Listening

Social media monitoring and listening are not the same thing. While both strategies track conversations about your brand, they have distinct differences. Monitoring focuses on real-time tracking of mentions, tags, and interactions related to a brand, product, or service. On the other hand, listening involves a broader, long-term analysis of conversations and trends to extract meaningful insights and inform strategies.

The Objectives of Monitoring and Listening Couldn't Be More Different

The goals of monitoring and listening couldn't be more different. Monitoring prioritizes immediate actions, such as customer engagement or damage control. For example, you might need to respond to a negative review on Instagram to resolve a complaint. Listening, on the other hand, aims to understand customer sentiment, industry trends, and future opportunities. For example, you might identify a rising trend in remote work discussions to create content targeting that audience.

Monitoring and Listening Rely on Different Types of Data

Monitoring and listening rely on different types of data to achieve their goals. Monitoring relies on quantitative data, like the number of mentions or likes, to measure engagement and brand visibility. For instance, you might track a hashtag campaign’s performance by monitoring usage statistics and engagement metrics.

Listening utilizes qualitative and quantitative data to uncover deeper insights, such as customer conversations' underlying emotions or themes. For example, you might analyze why customers prefer a competitor’s product through sentiment analysis of online reviews.

The Timeframes for Monitoring and Listening Are Not the Same

Monitoring and listening also operate on different timeframes. Monitoring operates in real-time or short-term windows to address immediate needs. For example, you might notice a spike in complaints about delayed deliveries and take immediate action to inform customers. Listening, however, involves a long-term view, analyzing data over weeks, months, or even years. For instance, you might track discussions about sustainability trends over a year to develop a comprehensive eco-friendly campaign.

Action Plans for Monitoring and Listening Are Different

Finally, monitoring and listening have different action plans. Monitoring helps brands react to what is happening now. For example, if a customer queries about your new product, you can respond to their question on social media within minutes to maintain positive engagement. On the other hand, listening guides brands on what actions to take in the future. For instance, you can adjust your product lines accordingly if you track customer conversations about a particular product and identify a preference shift towards minimalistic design.

Practical Use Cases for Monitoring and Listening

When to Use Monitoring

Use monitoring when you need to respond to immediate issues. Here are a few practical examples:

Customer Support: Responding promptly to queries or complaints. —for example, A customer tweets about a technical issue, and the support team addresses it instantly.

Crisis Management: Managing real-time PR challenges. —For example, Address misinformation about your product circulating on social media.

Campaign Tracking: Measuring engagement during a live campaign. —For example, I monitor hashtags during a product launch to gauge audience reach.

When to Use Listening

Use listening to gain insights that inform future business decisions. Here are a few practical examples:

Market Research: Understanding industry trends and competitor strategies. —For example, Listen to discussions about emerging technologies in your sector.

Product Development: Gaining insights into customer needs and preferences. —for example, Discovering that customers want a feature your product currently lacks.

Strategic Planning: Crafting campaigns and messaging aligned with audience sentiment.

—Develop a campaign promoting inclusivity after noticing it resonates with your audience.

How Monitoring and Listening Work Together

To illustrate how monitoring and listening work together, consider this example. A restaurant brand notices a spike in tweets complaining about long delivery times (monitoring). By analyzing broader conversations, they find that competitors promote faster delivery services (listening). The brand responds by optimizing its delivery process and launching a campaign highlighting improvements.

Integrating Monitoring and Listening

Integrating monitoring and listening into your social media strategy creates a comprehensive approach to managing brand conversations. Monitoring ensures real-time engagement and response, while listening provides actionable insights for long-term improvements. For instance, a clothing brand uses monitoring to track immediate feedback on a new collection and to discover the overall sentiment toward sustainable fashion.

Tips for Combining Monitoring and Listening

Use the Right Tools

Leverage tools like Brandwise that combine real-time monitoring with advanced listening capabilities. For example, you can automatically moderate comments while analyzing trends in customer feedback.

Set Clear Objectives

Define what you want to achieve with both strategies. For example, monitoring can be used to respond to customer queries and listen to refine marketing campaigns.

Allocate Resources Wisely

Assign teams or use tools specializing in real-time engagement (monitoring) or data analysis (listening). For example, a dedicated team handles immediate responses, while a data analytics team focuses on long-term trends.

Review and Adjust

Regularly evaluate the insights gained from listening and refine monitoring strategies accordingly. For instance, if listening reveals dissatisfaction with customer service, adjust monitoring practices to catch and resolve such issues faster.

If you are looking for an efficient comment moderation tool, check out Brandwise. It’s an intelligent social media management tool that uses AI to automatically moderate comments on ads and posts, providing intelligent replies to comments and messages. Brandwise streamlines workflow by consolidating social media interactions and offers valuable insights to enhance customer engagement strategies.

Tools for Monitoring and Listening

Brandwise is an intelligent social media management tool powered by AI. It helps businesses manage high volumes of social media interactions effortlessly, especially during critical times like product launches.

Brandwise’s comment moderation feature automatically hides negative comments and generates intelligent replies to customer queries. This means you can respond to social feedback quickly without getting caught up in negativity.

The tool tracks mentions comments, and tags across social platforms in real time to ensure no customer interaction is missed. And its AI-driven insights identify FAQs and customer concerns to refine engagement strategies.

Hootsuite is a well-known social media management platform that offers robust monitoring capabilities across multiple networks. The tool’s stream view displays mentions, hashtags, and keywords in real time so that you can track engagement.

Hootsuite also provides performance metrics and audience insights through its analytics dashboard. You can set up streams for specific campaigns or ongoing hashtags to monitor activity over time.

Collaboration tools enable team members to handle tasks like responding to comments or addressing complaints.

Sprout Social focuses on audience engagement and provides detailed reports for better decision-making. Its inbox consolidates messages and mentions from all social platforms for quick response.

With Sprout Social, you can track conversations about your brand or competitors to uncover valuable insights. The tool also delivers advanced reporting to measure customer sentiment and campaign effectiveness. Integration with CRM helps businesses maintain personalized engagement by tracking customer history.

4. Brandwatch: The Deep Insights Specialist

Brandwatch specializes in providing deep insights through AI-powered social listening and monitoring tools. The platform’s sentiment analysis measures customers' feelings about your brand or products.

Brandwatch can help you identify trends and detect rising topics relevant to your industry. You can set custom alerts to notify you of significant changes in mentions or sentiment. Visual analytics offers graphs and heatmaps for better data visualization.

Zoho Social is an affordable solution for small to medium-sized businesses looking to manage and monitor social media effectively. The monitoring dashboard tracks hashtags, mentions, and brand keywords to help you measure awareness and customer perceptions over time.

You can also plan and automate posts for better reach with Zoho Social’s post-scheduling feature. Team collaboration tools assign tasks like responding to comments or reviews to specific team members. Real-time alerts notify businesses of high-priority mentions or complaints.

Brand awareness is at the top of the list of goals that businesses want to achieve with social media marketing. It’s a key performance indicator for social media marketing that’s easy to understand: The more a target audience recognizes a brand, the more likely they are to trust it and eventually make a purchase. Increasing brand awareness on social media can help businesses reach their target audience, attract new followers, and enhance their reputation.

Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow brands to connect with their audience by introducing them to the business and its offerings. As brands share posts on social media, their target audience can learn about the company, discover its tone and personality, and see what the brand offers. This process builds familiarity and trust, which can help improve sales.