What is the difference between Social Listening & Community Management?
and how do I know which my business needs?
We get this question a lot - what is the difference between Social Listening and Community Management, and which one do we need for our business?
The short answer is that Social Listening and Community Management are both essential to a successful social media strategy, but serve different purposes. Here’s everything you need to know about both to decide what’s best for your brand -
Social Listening
What is Social Listening?:
Social listening involves monitoring social media platforms for mentions of your brand, products, competitors, industry information, or any relevant keywords or topics.
Its Purpose:
The primary objective is to gather insights into what people are saying about your brand or products online. It helps you understand sentiment, trends, and customer feedback.
Social listening includes using tools to track mentions, analyzing sentiment, identifying trends, and extracting actionable insights from the data collected.
Example: Monitoring Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, and other platforms for mentions of your brand name or relevant keywords, and analyzing the sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) associated with those mentions.
This is great for understanding customer perception around a new campaign, product, LTO, or general brand perception. Think of social listening as just that - listening. Taking in all of the important information and assessing it; from there you can make informed decisions on strategy.
Community Management
What is Community Management?
Community management involves actively engaging with your audience on social media platforms to foster relationships, provide customer support, and build a sense of community around your brand.
Its Purpose:
The objective of community management is to interact with your audience, address their questions or concerns, encourage discussions, and build brand loyalty.
Community management includes responding to comments and messages, moderating discussions, initiating conversations, providing helpful information, and resolving customer issues in a timely manner.
Example: Responding to customer questions and comments on your social channels, thanking fans for their feedback, facilitating brand or industry related discussions and engaging with fans in a fun or meaningful way
How to Determine What Your Business Needs:
To determine whether your business needs social listening, community management, or both, consider the following factors:
Goals: Clarify your social media marketing goals. If you aim to understand customer sentiment and market trends, social listening is crucial. If you want to build a loyal community of engaged followers, community management is essential.
Audience Engagement: Assess your current level of audience engagement on social media. If you notice a lack of interaction or customer feedback, community management may be needed. Posts with higher engagement also tend to get higher reach, so CM may organically help increase that. If you're unsure about what your audience is saying about your brand, social listening can provide valuable insights.
Resources: Consider your available resources, including time, budget, and manpower. Social listening often requires dedicated tools and analysis, that can get pricey when software is purchased in house which is why an agency (like us!) may be a good option. Community management demands active engagement and an understanding of social media trends and tone. Determine what your main objectives are and resources you can allocate to each strategy.
Industry Trends: Evaluate industry trends and competitive landscape. If your competitors are actively engaging with their audience or if there's a significant amount of online conversation around your industry, both social listening and community management are necessary to stay competitive.
In many cases, brands benefit from a combination of social listening and community management to fully leverage the power of social media. By understanding the differences between the two and assessing your business needs, you can develop a comprehensive social media strategy that drives meaningful engagement and fosters brand growth.