As you become more involved in the e-commerce landscape, new terms and tactics start to surface. Yet, they prove their influential role in driving more success and an elevated performance for your e-commerce.
Two of these tactics are social listening and social monitoring. They have gained wide popularity due to their massive importance for online business and for driving more engagement, leads, and brand awareness. We have to tell you, this is just the beginning.
So, in this article, we will take through the magnificence of these marketing strategies by tackling social listening VS social monitoring. We will delve into their benefits, uses, importance, and key differences.
Now is the time to learn so, get ready!
Table Of Contents:
Let’s start by discussing and defining social monitoring. Social monitoring, or social media monitoring, is a marketing tactic that involves monitoring, observing, and tracking brand mentions on social media platforms, blogs, review websites, etc.
Through social monitoring, you oversee any conversation, share, comment, hashtag, keyword, or mention for your brand. This allows your e-commerce brand to have an overview of customers’ perceptions of your brand and products. So, we can say it’s a mere collection of data to stay up to date.
As for social listening, you go further by analyzing the online conversations related to your industry. Hence, you are not specifically looking for your brand mentions. Instead, you are examining mentions related to the whole industry and domain.
Using social listening, you identify industry benchmarks, winning marketing tactics, messaging strategies, and competitors’ performance. As a result, you will develop successful strategies to outpace competitors.
The benefits of social listening and social monitoring are vast. In addition, there are plenty of ways your e-commerce can use these marketing tactics to drive more success. Therefore, let’s break down the benefits of social listening VS social monitoring.
1- Answer Customers’ Inquiries
One of the most important uses of social monitoring is answering customers’ inquiries. Generally, customers go for social media channels to share their thoughts and inquiries about different brands.
Therefore, whenever your brand is mentioned in any conversation by customers having inquiries, you have to reach out promptly to respond to these inquiries.
Hence, you have to be active in social monitoring to improve the image of your brand and enhance customer engagement.
2- Gather Social Proof
Social proof is a psychological phenomenon that shows that people generally tend to emulate others and seek others' confirmation.
One of the best practices for social proof is to share customers’ feedback and reviews. So, just like you focus on responding to customers’ inquiries, you can monitor the positive feedback as well to empower social proof.
Positive customer feedback gives a boost to your e-commerce and its positive performance. In addition, it builds brand trust and encourages higher conversion rates.
3- Identify Relevant Trends
One of the vital benefits of social monitoring is identifying relevant trends. Examining customers' behaviors and how they interact with your brand identifies when they are most likely interested in your products, who are the segments interested the most in your products, and other relevant purchase trends.
Accordingly, you can deliver better products and services while tailoring better marketing strategies.
1- Examine Competitors
That’s your chance to check out what people are saying about your competitors. Listen and examine conversations to see customers’ perceptions about competitors, mistakes they make that you need to avoid, and points of strengths you can replicate and improve.
Accordingly, social listening will provide your e-commerce business with a holistic overview of the status of your competitors, which you can benefit from by improving your e-commerce performance.
1- Identify Industry Opportunities And Gaps
By incorporating social listening in your e-commerce, you can delve into more details about your industry and what customers are saying about it. As a result, you will be able to identify industry opportunities and gaps to embark on them.
Listening to what customers are saying on various platforms provides valuable insights into what people value in a business. Hence, if you are doing things the right way, it’s a chance to verify your stance. If not, you can gather ideas to ensure you nail down your tactics and make the necessary adjustments.
2- Identify Influencers And Loyalists
Social listening enables your online business to identify influencers and loyalists who can later be used as your brand advocates.
Influencers are those online figures who have a huge fan base. Yet, they constantly recommend your brand to their followers and engage in online conversations mentioning your products. So, they are true brand advocates.
Identifying the right influencers is crucial for any business. However, it’s regarded as a tricky process especially with the large number of online influencers nowadays. Therefore, with social listening, you can pinpoint those relevant loyalists and influencers who will contribute to increasing brand awareness.
Various reasons make social listening and social monitoring important for e-commerce. Accordingly, we will take you through these reasons to ensure you are convinced to use these tactics.
Avoid Crisis Situations
By constantly monitoring and listening to the buzz created around your brand, you will be able to avoid crises linked to your reputation. Whenever your business is mentioned, you are instantly here to respond and to transform negative feedback into a positive one.
Accordingly, this will prevent the situation from escalating for your e-commerce brand and turn into a reputation crisis.
Leads Generation
Social media is shoppers’ go-to whenever they need product recommendations. We are not exaggerating when we say that social media platforms and their reviews can make or break your e-commerce. Online shoppers trust customers’ reviews on these platforms more than any paid ads or collaborations.
Therefore, the more your brand is mentioned positively, the more leads and potential customers will be generated. This is how things work on social media; word of mouth is massively influential.
To make sure you are on the right path, you have to ask for customers’ feedback post purchases. Yet, with social monitoring, you don’t have to do so. You gather feedback without asking, as everything you need is already there on social media platforms or blogs.
Accordingly, social monitoring is important for any e-commerce business to automatically collect valuable customer insights from ongoing conversations about your brand. Not to mention that the burden of having to ask for shoppers’ feedback is eliminated.
Develop A Clear Brand Identity
Social listening and monitoring are of vital importance as they provide your online business with a comprehensive view of what people are saying about your brand and your industry.
This is crucial when developing your brand identity. You will be able to test the clarity of your brand identity and differentiate your brand from competitors. Consequently, it will ensure that you are on the right track regarding your clear and recognizable brand identity.
1- Macro-Scale VS Micro-Scale
Sometimes, social listening and social monitoring are used interchangeably. Yet, there are distinct differences between the two of them like the scale of occurrence.
To elaborate, in social monitoring, you are working on a micro-scale by focusing on customers' mentions and comments related to your brand and product.
In contrast, social listening is a macro-scale as it widens the scope by focusing on conversations related to the whole industry, including competitors.
2- Long Term VS Short Term
Social monitoring is regarded as a short-term marketing tactic. You monitor brand mentions and respond to customers’ inquiries promptly. So, the role of social monitoring ends at this point.
However, social listening is an ongoing process and a long-term one. To ensure your e-commerce advancement, you have to constantly keep up with industry conversations, competitors' positions, and market trends. So, it never ends at a certain point; it’s a continuous process.
3- Proactive vs. Reactive
Social listening is a proactive process. Your business initiates the digging and examination of industry insights to identify potential opportunities and gaps. There’s no specific incident that triggered your acts, but the process is based on your efforts to gain a competitive edge.
Unlike social listening, social monitoring is a reactive one. The process is initiated by a primary act taken by customers—for instance, a comment, mention, or hashtag related to your business. Thus, you wait for customers to act so your business can react through social monitoring.
Final Thoughts
At this point, we are glad to say that you are all caught up on the vital marketing strategies of social listening and social monitoring. Just realizing their importance for transforming the performance of your e-commerce is considered progress.
Therefore, don’t waste any time and embark on these winning strategies. You know what they say: time is money.
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