Social listening vs social monitoring

What is social monitoring?

Looks at

One post at a time

Asks

Did someone mention us?

Ends with

A reply, or a number in a report

Social monitoring means watching for posts that mention your business and dealing with each one as it arrives. Someone tags you in a complaint, you see it and you reply. Someone uses your hashtag, and the count goes up.

It works with single posts and with numbers: how many mentions this week, how many were negative, how fast you answered. It's reactive. You wait for the post, then you respond.

What is social listening?

Looks at

Many posts over weeks

Asks

Why are people saying this?

Ends with

A change to your business

Social listening starts with the same posts, but it reads them side by side. You look back over a week or a month and ask why. Why did the complaints start on Tuesday? Why does everyone mention the queue and nobody mention the price?

Then you change something. Maybe you open a second till, or drop a promotion that keeps annoying people. Replying to one post is monitoring. Fixing the thing that caused it is listening.

What does the difference look like in practice?

Say you run a bakery. On Monday, someone posts that your croissants were stale. Monitoring finds the post, and you reply to say sorry. That's worth doing.

By Friday, four more people have posted the same thing, and every one of them bought in the afternoon. Listening is noticing that pattern. The croissants are fine in the morning. They just sit on the shelf too long. So you bake a second, smaller batch at noon, and the posts stop.

Monitoring answered five posts. Listening made sure there wasn't a sixth.

Which one does a small business need?

Both, and they use the same posts, so you don't need two tools. Monitoring keeps a bad post from sitting unanswered for days. Listening tells you what to fix, so the same post doesn't come back next week.

If you only have a few minutes a day, start with monitoring and answer the urgent posts. Then, once a week, read the week's posts together in one sitting. I think that weekly read is where the useful ideas come from.

How can you tell which one a tool does?

Not by its name. The two words get mixed up a lot, on tool websites too. A tool that counts mentions and sends alerts is doing monitoring, whatever its homepage says.

For listening, you need to read the posts, not just the totals. That's hard when customers post in a language you don't read. A chart of posts in Korean tells you something happened, but not what.

Where does Herd fit?

Herd does both jobs. For monitoring, it finds posts about your business on different social media apps and labels each one positive, neutral or negative. Urgent posts come to you by email, with a reply drafted in your tone that you edit before you post.

For listening, it translates every post into your language, so you can read all of them and not just count them. Once a week it sends a one-page report with the sentiment trend and the topics people talked about most.