The difference between social media monitoring vs. social media listening

What’s the difference between social media monitoring and social media listening? People often use these terms interchangeably, but they’re not quite the same.

To break it down:

• Social media monitoring involves tracking social media messages, comments and conversations directly related to your brand and responding to those engagements.
• Social media listening is the process of analyzing the full spectrum of conversations around your industry, brand, and any topics relevant to your brand to understand your audience better and improve your campaign strategy.

Ultimately, businesses need both because social media monitoring tells you what people say about your brand or industry, and social media listening tells you why.

For example, let’s say you lead marketing for an e-commerce brand, and you just launched a new product. Monitoring might show that many customers are discussing a particular product. These insights may indicate that the product is popular—in theory.

While social media listening could reveal that many of those mentions were negative. Dig even deeper, and you might find that the issue isn’t even with the product but with shipping delays. While monitoring addresses the symptoms, listening reveals the root cause.

In this article, we’ll define social media monitoring and social listening in depth and highlight the critical differences between the two.

Social media monitoring definition

Social media is a go-to channel for brands to connect with their audience. Social media monitoring is the first step towards powering these connections, helping brands find the conversations they should be aware of or participate in. It’s the process of gathering useful social discussions and messages to keep track of customers’ likes, dislikes, wants and changing needs.

It allows you to track mentions of your:

• Brand name and common misspellings
• Product names and common misspellings
• Main competitors
• Product or brand in particular areas

Example of social media monitoring

Social media monitoring tracks the key phrases and terms important to your company and surfaces relevant conversations for you to respond to.

For example, earlier this year, 100 Thieves, a lifestyle and gaming company, mentioned the footwear brand Crocs on X (formerly known as Twitter). Even though they didn’t tag the account, Crocs likely used social media monitoring to find the mention and respond promptly. 

The benefits of social media monitoring

Social media mentions provide vital business intelligence that can inform more strategic decision-making.

Monitoring is also essential to your brand’s communications pipeline. Your social media managers and customer care agents should own most of this interaction, acting as traffic controllers for what’s coming in across your social networks.

How to make the most of social media monitoring

First, centralize your social profiles into a single platform enabling message monitoring at scale. Then, create alerts to help your agents easily track and respond to direct or indirect brand mentions. Include your brand’s handle and broader mentions. Also, account for common misspellings, nicknames, flagship products and industry-adjacent terms.

By receiving these alerts, your social team will be better able to block and tackle on your brand’s behalf, answering FAQs while routing other critical messages to different departments within your organization—from HR to sales.

To get even more sophisticated, your community managers can identify potential entry points to guide purchasing decisions. But be careful: This tactic is as much an art as a science.

Social media listening definition

Social media listening is about examining the conversations and trends around your brand and industry, and using those insights to make smarter marketing choices.

It helps you determine why, where and how these conversations are happening and what people think—not just when they tag or directly mention your brand.

Example of social media listening

Social media listening can help you plan better campaigns and improve your content strategy and messaging by removing the guesswork of what content will resonate. Analyzing metrics like volume, share of voice and sentiment will help reveal what offers are most popular with your audience and how they truly feel about your brand and products.

One social media listening example is when a franchise restaurant used Sprout’s Listening capabilities to see which food items their customers loved and which were getting overlooked.

Our Listening Topic Themes data revealed some interesting patterns. While nachos weren’t mentioned as often as other food items, they had the highest percentage of positive mentions and the lowest percentage of negative mentions. So, the franchise decided to create more content about nachos because the data showed that customers really loved them.

The benefits of social media listening

Without social media listening, you might miss important industry trends and customer preferences, leading to missed improvement opportunities. Plus, while social media monitoring focuses on what’s being said and by who, listening helps businesses understand the overall sentiment and context of those conversations. Without it, companies might misinterpret customer feelings and feedback.

How to use social media listening for your business

Start with turn-key social listening solutions, then progress to more intricate techniques. Powerful, automated listening tools requiring minimal setup can deliver meaningful, actionable data as well as customizable ones.

For instance, you can look at how often your brand is mentioned on X during a certain time period, and which hashtags, keywords and related terms are often used. This can help you see how people feel about your brand, products and campaigns. All this is possible without creating complex search queries or relying upon algorithmic sentiment triggers. Simply listening to what people say alongside your brand mentions is enough.

Once you have a baseline, then you can get more advanced. Expand your listening with solutions that give the total volume and help you recognize patterns, find trends and figure out share of voice in groups of keywords or queries.

However you approach it, the goal is to reach clearly defined outcomes within your brand’s larger social strategy. For example, using monitoring tactics result in enhanced engagement and listening efforts to inform more strategic decision-making.

Key differences between social listening vs. social monitoring

If monitoring is the entry point, listening is the graduate degree. Most social media platforms offer basic, native monitoring capabilities. But a comprehensive social monitoring and listening strategy needs a tool like Sprout Social to track mentions and analyze data across multiple social media channels.

Here are a few more fundamental differences between social monitoring and social listening.

Micro vs. macro

Social media monitoring is micro. It’s focused on the details, like individual brand mentions or comments. In comparison, social media listening is macro. It’s about looking at the bigger picture and noticing how people talk about your brand, products, industry and competitors.

For example, monitoring would tell you thirty people directly tagged your brand in posts today. Listening would reveal that most of those mentions were either rave reviews about a new product or complaints about customer service.

Reactive vs. proactive

Social media monitoring is reactive. It involves observing and responding to direct mentions or tags as they happen. On the other hand, social media listening is proactive. It provides deeper insights that help you strategize and plan.

For example, while monitoring might alert you to a single customer complaint, listening can uncover a trend of complaints about a specific product feature, which can be fixed or optimized to prevent future issues.

Tactical vs. analytical

Social media monitoring is a more tactical, task-focused process. Many social media monitoring tools like Sprout Social collect all your mentions in one centralized place and notify you when there’s a new conversation. From there, you can focus on replying with appropriate responses.

In comparison, social listening is more analytical and strategic. Social listening tools offer in-depth insight into the context and sentiment behind what people are saying. Rather than simply responding to messages, listening shows you engagement patterns and trends for your brand and industry. This information enables you to set data-informed benchmarks and goals to make more strategic decisions. Social listening requires analyzing many different things to do this well, making it difficult to do it without an automated social listening tool.

How to use Sprout Social for social monitoring and listening

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management tool with monitoring and listening capabilities. These solutions enable users to zoom in on meaningful conversations and zoom out to analyze the trends and patterns that inform their social media strategy.

How exactly? Let’s explore this more in-depth.

Smart Inbox

The Smart Inbox is where you keep track of every conversation with and about your brand. It’s the essence of monitoring, helping you to centralize and foster authentic conversations with action in mind. Messages from your social channels are centralized into one feed to ensure you stay focused and never miss a message. Use Case Assignments to delegate messages to other team members and tags to keep all your messages organized. Plus, lean on our Message Spike Alerts to know when there’s a surge of @-mentions that need to be addressed, so you can avoid or address potential brand crises.

Brand Keywords

Brand Keywords help you capture more relevant conversations about your brand, industry or competition. This is a step towards listening as it enables you to track various topics beyond your brand. Brand Keywords are custom searches that run constantly and display results in your Smart Inbox, which you can interact with just like any other message. You’re still focused purely on messages to respond to or offer support on a personal level.

If you aren’t actively searching for these types of messages, you may miss the chance to participate in important conversations.

Sprout’s premium listening solutions

Sprout’s Listening solutions offer a window into an audience’s candid thoughts and feelings to uncover trends, reveal patterns and measure emotional response around any topic.

Listen in on millions of conversations happening across Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, X, YouTube and the web about your brand or topics important to you. No need for boolean expertise, as we offer templates to help you build queries quickly. And with Recommend by AI Assist, generate keyword suggestions to help refine your Listening queries for richer insights. These capabilities enable you to easily keep a pulse on your brand’s health, track sentiment around events or analyze insights from your industry, competitors and campaigns.

Once you’ve refined your query, you’ll likely have a lot of information to sort through. Our Analyze by AI Assist helps you efficiently identify your Topic’s most significant Smart Categories, keywords, hashtags, emojis and mentions. It turns data into clear insights, helping you instantly cut through the noise so you’re spending less time on analysis and more on strategy. All while giving you the flexibility to go broad on trends or zoom into individual posts for qualitative insights.

The insights Sprout’s Listening provides can power your social and business strategy, so you’re ready for the future.

Get started with social monitoring and listening

Social monitoring and listening are excellent for tuning into conversations around a brand and industry. But it also comes with a learning curve. From determining what hashtags and keywords to track, to understanding how to interpret and act on the data in listening reports, it can initially be overwhelming.

Our social listening guide is a great place to start. In just 90 minutes, you’ll get answers to questions about brand sentiment, trending discussions and content performance to optimize your content strategy.

 

The post The difference between social media monitoring vs. social media listening appeared first on Sprout Social.

from Sprout Social https://ift.tt/5EWxDCa
via IFTTT

Influencer outreach: The 5-step strategy guide

Influencers and creators play a pivotal role in global social media marketing. Many leading brands rely on influencer marketing to raise awareness about their products, build brand recognition and increase their overall sales.

Regardless of product, partnering with an influencer can get your business in front of the right audience. But the first hurdle can be challenging: influencer outreach.

To help you more easily secure the right partnerships, we’ve created a 5-stage influencer outreach strategy. Find out how to define your approach, source the right influencers and nurture long-term relationships so you can continue to succeed.

What is influencer outreach?

Influencer outreach is the process of contacting influencers for brand collaborations, and typically involves research and communicating via direct messages or emails.

While some marketing strategies can be transactional, influencer partnerships are relationship-focused and mutually beneficial. You gain access to their followers, and they get to try your products or services and get paid. And both you and the influencer get fresh content.

Whether you work with a smaller group of reliable influencers or with hundreds at once, depends on the resources you have to manage those relationships.

As of 2024, 38% of brands have partnered with 10 influencers or less, but the remaining 62% of brands have worked with 10 or more different influencers, and 15% of those have worked with over 1,000. Your outreach process is all about finding a few that you’re comfortable with, and then scaling as your budget and bandwidth allows for it. But always remember to focus on the individual relationship your company has with each influencer.

How to create a successful influencer outreach strategy in 5 steps

These five steps will guide you to influencer outreach success, no matter your business size or industry.

1. Define your influencer marketing strategy

Define your overall influencer strategy. List the main goals you want to achieve with your partnerships. Create similar goals for your upcoming campaign, and look at where these goals can be aligned.

Some common examples of influencer marketing goals include:

• Attract more UGC (user-generated content)
• Build trust in your brand
• Raise awareness about a new product or service type
• Generate more leads
• Encourage more user reviews
• Drive sales
• Boost website traffic or follower count

These goals will drive every part of your influencer outreach strategy and your campaigns. They’ll determine the type of influencer to look for, the budget you need and what defines success within your partnership.

2. Identify the right influencers for your campaign

To find the perfect influencers, start by considering their reach.

Influencers are categorized into four key segments depending on their audience size across platforms. These range from mega-influencers and celebrities with 1M+ followers, to nano-influencers with less than 10K.

Having a larger following doesn’t automatically mean an influencer will be a stronger partner. It’s better to work with influencers who share your company’s values and who have a target audience that closely resembles yours. It also depends on your campaign goals; smaller influencers can be better for engagement and conversions, while larger influencers grant you further reach.

It’s not all about size. You should also prioritize diversity during your influencer search, and make sure you work with a wide range of influencers and creators, including black creators and other BIPOC influencers. Partnering with influencers of different backgrounds allows you to create more varied content for multiple audiences.

Search for influencers based on their audience demographics, like:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Preferred social network
• Buying power

Influencers who have strong audience affinity with your brand will lead to more successful campaigns. For example, Biona Organic, a vegetarian food brand, collaborated with Christinasots, a UK-based vegan macro-influencer to create a unique recipe featuring Biona Organic products. This partnership resulted in more than 788,000 impressions for the creator and the brand.

Track the engagement metrics of any influencer you might partner with, particularly for an industry-specific influencer or creator. Sometimes, a smaller, highly engaged community will lead to a better campaign than a larger community that doesn’t engage much.

Some of this research can be done manually through social platforms, but it can be time-consuming. Save time by using a dedicated solution like Sprout Social Influencer Marketing (formerly Tagger).

With Sprout, you can filter search results based on brand affinity. This immediately reveals influencers who share the same interests and audience as your brand, through data-driven research. You can also assess audience authenticity, to make sure an influencer’s following is legitimate and engaged.

When identifying influencers, cater your strategy to different social networks. We’ve outlined how your strategy should change for each major network below.

Influencers for an Instagram campaign

The majority of consumers (61%) say that Instagram is their top social media network for product discovery, which is influencers’ bread and butter.

With Instagram influencer marketing, engagement rates are vital. Look for an engagement rate of at least 3%.

Also, pay attention to the type of content an Instagram influencer produces. If you’re planning a campaign that needs video, make sure your chosen influencer specializes in Reels.

Influencers for a TikTok campaign

TikTok influencer marketing can be an entry point into smaller subcultures. TikTok influencers often speak to very niche audiences who have specific content preferences based on their hobbies and interests.

Tracking TikTok subcultures can also be a useful way of determining an influencer’s niche audience. Tapping into these audiences can help your brand access some of the benefits of niche marketing, like having less competition and being able to optimize your marketing spend.

Influencers for a YouTube campaign

Several metrics are important for YouTube influencer marketing success, particularly subscriber counts, engagement rates‌ and watch time.

Track an influencer’s average video length and how often they post. This should give you a better idea of how long it takes them to make a video, and where your ad could fit into their usual video format.

Influencers for a Facebook campaign

Facebook influencers can help brands market to huge audiences; 83% of social users have a Facebook profile, and almost half (44%) of them have interacted with brand content through Facebook at least once a day.

Now that Instagram Stories and Reels are accessible within the Facebook app, it’s also possible to negotiate bundled content packages with your influencers. Your Facebook influencer marketing campaign can then reach more people while being more cost-effective.

Influencers for a LinkedIn campaign

When finding LinkedIn influencers, the most important metric is usually follower count.

Pay particular attention to audience affinity, as well as what an influencer is posting about. It’s also worth looking at whether a LinkedIn influencer has a newsletter on the platform or a substack. These materials can extend their audience, while also showing you the topics they’re known for talking about.

3. Prepare your compensation offer

Once you’ve created a list of influencers, decide how you’ll compensate them. Familiarize yourself with common influencer pricing figures. The amount you’ll offer will depend on factors like the influencer’s reach, the type and volume of content they’ll create and the chosen compensation model.

Common compensation models include pay per post, pay per subscriber‌ or pay per view, among others.  Don’t forget to factor in other payment strategies, like affiliate marketing, complimentary product/software access or long-term package deals across several months.

One example of a unique influencer partnership is SeaVees’s deal with inclusive food influencer Lahbco. SeaVees worked with Lahbco to design an exclusive shoe, based on his values and life experiences, made to appeal to his audience of followers. All the proceeds for the shoe also go towards the Ali Forney Center, who support homeless LGBTQ+ youth in New York City. This is a great example of an alternative compensation model where the company, influencer and the wider community all benefit.

All of this needs to work within your budget. If you haven’t already, download Sprout’s influencer marketing toolkit for a budgeting template that will help you make sense of influencer marketing spend within your overall social media budget. You’ll also get a campaign brief template, where you can further refine your campaign goals.

4. Craft a compelling influencer outreach message

Streamline your influencer outreach strategy by creating DM and email templates that allow you to contact several different influencers at once. However, avoid generic, mass-produced templates that influencers are likely to ignore.

To make your templates feel personal, include a handful of customizable sections where you can mention the influencer’s name, recent work or something specific that resonates with you about their content.

Some examples might be “I loved your recent campaign post with ____, we were hoping to create something similar”, or “It was great to see you raise so much awareness about ____ in your latest Reel.”

The more personalized, the better. You want to create a strong first impression and prove to an influencer that you genuinely appreciate their work.

Here’s a list of the essential information to include in your influencer outreach template:

1. Start with the influencer’s name and a personalized greeting related to their content.
2. Introduce your company and your brand. If possible, connect this to the personalization above.
3. Explain what your campaign is. Personalize further by linking this to a campaign they’ve done for another company if you can.
4. Outline the specifics of how you expect the campaign to work. Include deliverables and a timeline. You can refine these at a later stage, but make sure this information is accurate.
5. Explain your mutual value proposition and your initial offer of compensation.
6. End with a CTA requesting a meeting, or their thoughts on your campaign idea.

This could then look something like this:

Hey [influencer name], I saw your [previous content and thoughts].

I work with [brand] on [your role], and we’re looking to partner with an influencer on a new campaign.

The campaign is [campaign details]. After seeing your [recent content, awareness, work with or other personalization] I thought you’d be a perfect fit.

We’re hoping to offer [compensation and budget].

Please let me know if you have any thoughts or questions and I’d be happy to answer them. Thanks for your time, and I look forward to hopefully working with you,

[your name, title]

[your company]

Use this general template to create more specific messages for agencies or different outreach situations. To find more template examples, check our master list of influencer outreach email templates.

If you’re sending emails, don’t forget to create a subject line. Make this as short and clear as possible, like “Collaboration Opportunity with [Your Brand]”. You can extend this with more personalization, but it’s important that the influencer can see clearly what your email is about when scanning their busy inbox.

Following up on your influencer outreach messages

If you haven’t received a response to your initial outreach, don’t give up! Follow up within a couple of weeks.

Influencers are often busy, so a friendly follow-up can keep the conversation going. Keep this follow-up message short, to the point and polite. Here’s an example:

Hey [influencer name],

I’m just quickly following up on my last message about our upcoming [campaign name]. Would you be interested in partnering or discussing this further?

Thanks,

[your name]

[your company]

5. Nurture a long-term relationship with influencers

Building a long-term relationship with influencers is a win-win. For starters, you won’t have to invest in as much outreach for your next campaign.

Working with an influencer long-term is also perfect for boosting your brand’s credibility. Your audience will see regular campaigns with the same influencer, which proves you’re a company that people enjoy working with. You might also be able to agree on a package deal over a longer period, which usually works out better for your budget and for the influencer you’re working with.

The influencer’s audience will also continue to see your campaigns which will help build their awareness and trust in your brand.

Mega YouTube influencer NakeyJakey has regular channel partnerships with OperaGX and RocketMoney among others. He creates comedic skits which have become a regular part of his gaming videos. These skits have built a huge following and increased awareness around the tech companies he’s agreed to partner with.

To nurture your relationship with an influencer and foster a long-term partnership, focus on genuine connection and mutual support like:

• Sharing your results
• Checking in with them regularly, not just when you have a new campaign idea
• Celebrating your joint successes
• Highlighting where their ideas or content made a real difference
• Engaging with their content on your social accounts
• Treating them as creative partners, not just promotional tools
• Making sure they get paid on time
• Having admin processes in place that make their job (and yours) easier

If you invest your time and energy into your working relationship, that effort will translate into more successful campaigns.

Influencer outreach best practices

Though every influencer outreach strategy is different, these are three best practices that are always relevant.

Do your research

Research is a fundamental part of the vetting process. Without accurate research, you risk dooming your campaign before it even starts.

Make use of solutions like Sprout Social Influencer Marketing to make data-driven decisions on who to work with. Our solution aggregates the data available to help you track relevant metrics like engagement rates and brand affinity.

When you reach the outreach stage, research how each influencer likes to be approached. Some will have an agency that handles collaborations. Others may have a separate email address or might prefer DMs. Find these in their bio. Using an influencer’s chosen communication channel shows a level of respect that starts your relationship on the right footing.

In the example below, fair fashion campaigner and influencer activist Venetia La Manna’s bio states that she doesn’t look at her DMs and refers potential partners to her email address.

Communicate campaign needs clearly

Outline all of your campaign expectations before an influencer starts creating content. A lot of this information should be in your outreach messages.

Also, include your campaign needs in an influencer contract. Remember to outline who is responsible for any costs incurred by creating content, as well as usage rights.

Share your goals and expected KPIs with your influencer before a campaign starts. They’ll then not be surprised when you go through the results of the campaign later.

This is one of the most crucial stages when figuring out how to hire an influencer. Communicating clearly across every stage keeps your campaign on track and more likely to succeed.

Evaluate campaign results and continuously improve

Campaign results can be tracked using several influencer marketing KPIs.

The first of these should be your ROI. Calculate expected ROI while you’re preparing your initial compensation offer. To maximize this ROI, work to continuously improve your campaigns over time.

But the success of a campaign doesn’t depend solely on financial returns. Other KPIs worth tracking can include:

• Reach and impressions
• Earned media value
• Positive brand sentiment increases
• Increased awareness
• Leads generated or conversions made
• Follower or audience growth rate

Set a KPI against each of your campaign goals. This makes it easier to track the success of each objective and shows you where to modify your campaigns to improve in the future.

Evaluating your KPIs can be streamlined by using Sprout Social Influencer Marketing. Sprout’s solution helps you figure out if your influencer campaigns are actually working. We use modular analytics dashboards to help you track ROI and other metrics. This means you can easily see how well your campaigns are doing and prove their value to leadership.

Harnessing the power of influencer outreach

With your refined influencer outreach strategy, you can identify and work with the right influencers for your brand. By continuing to improve your campaigns and nurturing your relationships, you’ll be well on your way to achieving even greater success.

Refine your strategy using Sprout’s influencer marketing plan template. Start a 7-week schedule that streamlines your efforts while boosting your campaign performance.

The post Influencer outreach: The 5-step strategy guide appeared first on Sprout Social.

from Sprout Social https://ift.tt/7O9pLad
via IFTTT