Social Listening vs. Social Monitoring: What’s the Difference?

The main difference between Social Listening and Social Monitoring is that social listening is done by the marketing team to understand the overall customer behavior and needs whereas social monitoring is often handled by the customer support team to handle customer service-related activities.

Before we move to more differences, let’s first understand Social Listening and Social Monitoring:

  • Social Listening: Social Listening refers to the practice of observing, analyzing, and interpreting the conversations, sentiments, and trends shared by individuals across various social media platforms.
  • Social Monitoring: Social Monitoring entails the proactive tracking and observing of specific brand mentions, keywords, or topics on social media platforms.

Now, let’s get to Social Listening vs Social Monitoring:

Major differences between Social Listening and Social Monitoring

Social Listening Social Monitoring
Social Listening involves capturing unstructured data as well as structured data. Social Monitoring is mostly focused on collecting structured data like metrics, shares, comments, likes, and follows.
Social Listening extends beyond social media and includes blogs, forums and news site. Social Monitoring is only limited to social media platforms.
Social Listening prioritizes understanding the consumer mindset, feedback and analysis. Social Monitoring prioritizes alerting on social media activity to enable timely intervention.
Social Listening is considered a more qualitative approach to social media analysis. Social Monitoring is thought to be more quantitative in nature.
Social Listening is often leveraged in brand reputation management initiatives. Social Monitoring is utilized in social performance measurement.

So, these are the main differences between the entities.

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