Take a look around you, people are busy using their smartphones and scrolling through social media apps- be it a family get together, parks, movie theatre, or at a party, wherever they are, the impulse to post and share that moment with people out there is far greater than living in the moment. This gives an edge to the marketing teams of giant companies in getting their research information. The gathered data is utilized by agencies for social monitoring and listening.

The two terminologies are often used interchangeably and sometimes understood as one process but there exists a clear difference among them. Let’s latch on to the differences and nitty-gritty details of how these two processes increase revenue and boost growth for companies.

Listening to the full spectrum conversations that are revolving around your brand, industry, products, or services relevant to your business, understanding buyer persona, and assessing audience needs and ongoing trends to improve marketing and advertising campaign strategy.

If you want to understand the conversational tone, mood, sentiment around your brand, social listening is very effective in gleaning meaningful insights like buyer intent and customer emotions. Whether the consumer is angry, frustrated, or happy to purchase your product/service, businesses can take the grip on why and how people are discussing their brand, products, or their market competitors.

Earlier social media marketing tactics included social listening as a method to track market campaign success, sentiment analysis, and monitor brand mentions. Though it is still relevant today, digital marketers, nowadays, are incorporating social listening as a market research tool. It helps them in uncovering useful insights and enhancing product marketing strategy. It helps marketing behemoths curate content, improve product and service offerings, and enhance the client experience.

We will share social listening statistics revolving around social media usage, improving customer experience, and impact on business results.

According to World Economic Forum, Gen Z spends around two hours and fifty-five minutes on social media, while Gen Y spends an average of two hours and 38 minutes per day on social media. The medium of brand awareness and knowledge sharing for these two generations is social media. Folks are spending maximum time over there and online consumer presence calls for brands to showcase their products and services in the timeframe when avid shoppers are most likely online. 79% of Consumers want businesses to answer within a day of contacting them via social media, but typical brand response rates are less than 25% across all industries. (Sprout Social). Brands that use social monitoring observe a 25% boost inactivity and a 50-minute reduction in reaction time on social channels. (SentiOne).

Imagine reading people’s minds and getting to know their expectations related to your product offerings, sounds awesome, right? Well, you can consider social media listening similar to getting into the consumer’s brain. The cool part is that while you are analyzing and listening to their concerns and talking about your brand, they won’t know that you’re listening. Here are some free tools which can be of great advantage to your business:

Monitoring social media for the messages that are directly related to your brand and responding to messages appropriately, entailing customer care, and tracking the way people use social media to communicate with your business and purchase your products or services.

It is done by using hashtags, tagging, business-related keywords, and direct mentions of brands.

Just like search engines for e.g. Google, send crawlers to the far distance of the internet, likewise, social media monitoring uses an algorithm-based tool that crawls sites and indexes them in real-time. When the sites are indexed, they can be found based on search queries and strings.

Social media monitoring has its own effect on how smartly you market your products in e-commerce stores. The usage of hashtags and related keywords is popular among businesses that are highly engaged in customer conversations.

A clear and crisp idea of public perception about your company is vital for your growth. Customers can be responded to in real-time and spontaneously on social media platforms. It helps you determine how specific demographics think about your brand.

Positive feedback can be used as a testimonial and client satisfaction memo and negative ones are used in evaluating your shortcomings and aid in refining customer experience. You can establish brand authenticity and credibility in consumers’ eyes, upgrade marketing expenditure by removing channels’ worst or lowest engagement levels.

Last but not the least, ROI can be calculated with the help of advanced reporting modules.

When you want to find what’s trending on a particular day or when something interests you, you go for typing that keyword with @ at the rate or # hashtag in the search bar on relevant social networks, a click is all it takes to jump into the plethora of information. People are spending most of their time on social media platforms for jotting down their thoughts, posting and sharing videos for fun. For marketers, this is a fantastic opportunity to go where their target audience is. Companies are putting in a lot of effort and investing big time to tune their strategies that align with the consumer’s buying impulse. Brands are highly particular about their reputation and stepping up the game in the marketplace through analytics can give you an edge in a fiercely competitive world.

To put it aptly, monitoring tells you what, listening tells you why. It’s similar to addressing symptoms through monitoring and the root cause is revealed by listening.

So start listening, start monitoring, both will help you in reaping the fruit of your labor.