You’ll hear people talking about social media listening tools when they mean monitoring tools, and vice versa, but technically they are different things. The key distinction lies in how close you are to the action: think zoomed-in vs. zoomed-out.
Social media monitoring means dealing with the day-to-day of managing your social monitoring platform feeds and reacting accordingly. It’s liking a comment on Instagram, getting into a conversation on Facebook, or replying to a tweet. It's responding to queries, compliments, and complaints.
Social media listening shows you the bigger picture. If you have all those likes, comments and posts gathered into graphs and categories, you’ll see patterns at play. You can then make decisions based on your understanding of what your customers or competitors are doing, within the context of industry changes.
Most importantly, you can note trends, find new opportunities and pre-empt a social crisis before it happens by listening to the digital world around you and seeking out information. Now, let’s take a look at some of the reasons why marketers and PRs at successful companies take both approaches.