Social Media Listening vs. Analytics What’s The Difference? Data plays an increasingly important role in marketing. Businesses across industries and regions of the world are expanding their budgets, hoping to uncover insights to give them a competitive advantage. But to get the most from data, it’s critical to assess whether those data insights show a comprehensive view or only a small part of the picture.

Although both social media analytics and listening provide approaches to understanding your social media performance, marketers often struggle to differentiate between these two sets of tools. Many companies rely solely on social media listening to evaluate the effectiveness of their strategy and consider the share of voice as an easy to interpret metric to evaluate success. Unfortunately, it only provides a narrow view of their overall performance - which needs to be complemented with insights from comprehensive social media analytics to get a more complete picture.

In this paper, we provide a detailed overview of the differences between social media listening and analytics. We also explain how marketers can best utilize the full potential of both tools to gain deeper data-based insight into their social media performance, with the objective of taking more well-informed decisions and getting more value from social media. Understanding the Differences Between Listening and Analytics

Social media listening and analytics are not the same. One should never be used to replace the other. The most fundamental difference between these tools lies in the scope of data they provide.

Social media listening tools offer a limited insight centered on what is being said about your business on social (earned media on social). Social media analytics allow you to gain a comprehensive overview of your campaign’s effectiveness (owned and paid media on social).

Analytics - Measures campaign effectiveness Listening - Measures campaign resonance

Analytics need to be an inherent part of building your social media strategy. They allow you to track Listening, on the other hand, while lacking a comprehensive view of your social media activity, a variety of metrics, such as the engagement rate, audience growth, and posting frequency that you can be effective in complementing your strategy. It allows you to monitor digital conversations can use to benchmark your company against the competitors to understand your performance in to understand what customers are saying about your company. It shows you how large your a broader context. Analytics enable you to measure the effectiveness of your content, both organic share of voice is in comparison to your competitors. Listening is also a great customer care and and promoted, to understand what works with your audiences and how successful your paid crisis management solution that enables you to discover potential problems and pain points, activities are. Most importantly, analytics are the core driver in maximizing your social media ROI and provide an appropriate response. by equipping you with insights needed to optimize your performance on social.

It’s important to keep in mind that the capabilities of social listening are limited. Due to closing its API to private profiles, you can only monitor the conversations of public profiles and Pages. is primarily a visual platform where companies are rarely being mentioned. is the only platform where social media listening is fully effective - but its user base is only a fraction of Facebook’s, and user growth has been stagnating for years, which means marketers are working with an increasingly smaller proportion of data. The bottom line is that the insights you collect by listening across these platforms are fragmented and should not be used as a reliable indicator of your social media success.

Listening vs. Analytics 03 Analytics at the Campaign Core

Analytics are the foundation to your social media campaign success. They play an integral role from the moment you plan your campaign to when you execute it and measure its effectiveness.

Listening can help you discover potential opportunities to be addressed through campaigning. Analytics are crucial to identifying the best performing content types that will help you run an engaging campaign - based on what has worked for you in the past and what has worked for your competitors.

Analytics are also at the core of execution. An analytics-first approach will ensure that the effectiveness of your campaign is accurately measured and reported, and will allow you to find out if you have met your objectives.

Listening vs. Analytics 04 CREATE EXECUTE PROMOTE

Gain consumer insights, identify Publish your content to your Invest your budget in content that will give best performing content, and find channels at the right time to you the maximum ROI by increasing ads inspiration for campaigns. maximize its effectiveness. effectiveness and decreasing future ads costs.

LEARN REPORT MEASURE AND REPEAT Demonstrate that your content Analyze the effectiveness of all paid Do more of what works and less is making an impact to social media and organic content to understand what of what doesn’t. and where it needs adjusting. is working best with your audience.

The utility of analytics lies in the accuracy of the metrics they measure. In contrast to listening, which gives you general information on your share of voice, analytics enable you to measure concrete campaign objectives through a set of very specific metrics. It also allows you to cross-compare those metrics to discover correlations between them that can help optimize your strategy. For example, if your reach is high, but engagement is low, you immediately know that your content strategy or targeting need readjusting - something you wouldn’t be able to learn through listening.

Listening vs. Analytics 05 There are several examples of how analytics give you an accurate measure of the effect your content is having on social media, helping you link your efforts to business ROI:

“How effective is my social media “Is my social media content campaign with my audience across working with my audience? “Is my content good enough my owned and paid channels? Is it Do I need to change that it is engaging the users generating the outcome desired? my content style or find which I reach through my (Filling out a form, downloading an a different format?” owned and paid channels?” ebook, purchasing a product, etc.)”

Engagement Reach Engagement Conversion Rate Rate

“How much of my social media These insights cannot be discovered through listening - and they campaign performance is “How much am I paying to generate are at the center of the success of your campaign on social media. That’s why it is crucial that analytics are always the primary source coming from paid activity?” clicks, if that is one of my objectives of your social media insights. In fact, your campaigns can be in my social media campaign?” effectively run using only the data from analytics, while listening Share of Interactions can be used to leverage additional information on how your and Share of Posts Cost per Click campaigns are resonating on social. (CPC)

Listening vs. Analytics 06 Gaining Next-level Insights with Predictive Analytics

While the metrics described on the previous page allow you to understand your campaigns’ effectiveness, predictive analytics can amplify their results to ensure you get the most ROI from your social media activity. Socialbakers’ predictive intelligence algorithms analyze information about the behavior of your fans and performance of your content to offer precise recommendations on publishing and promoting your posts.

PrimeTime Publishing gives you actionable recommendations for when to publish Post Performance Prediction assigns an intuitive grade (A - D) to each of your posts based that are tailored to each of your profiles. By discovering the optimal publishing time, on their predicted future performance. This allows you to make more efficient investments you can easily maximize your reach and interactions, and work more efficiently by by promoting only your best content, and to reap the benefits of an effective paid strategy, eliminating guesswork. such as lower Cost-per-Click.

Listening vs. Analytics 07 Analytics and Listening All in One Place Summary

With Socialbakers Suite, you have everything you need to maximize the effectiveness Both analytics and listening can be instrumental to your social media success. However, of your social media activities. From listening to analytics, you can easily access all they are intrinsically different in how they help you measure - and improve - the effectiveness the key metrics you need to measure your campaigns’ success in one place. of your strategy.

Analytics allows you to gain a deeper overview of your performance across a variety Analytics of metrics. These enable you to see the results of your social media efforts and find out how you stack up against the competition. You can then take informed action to optimize your strategy accordingly and improve your social media ROI. Evaluate and optimize your social media campaigns by monitoring a number of key metrics, such as fan growth and engagement, across all the key platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Listening is a tool that can complement the data you get from analytics with additional and Instagram. Get a comprehensive understanding of your results, put your performance information. Using listening, you’re able to see how people are responding to your in a competitive context, and optimize your strategy to maximize your social media ROI. campaigns on parts of social media, and to address potential questions and problems. While important, this forms just a part of what you need to be able to understand to improve the results of your social media campaigns and strategy. Listening Socialbakers Suite gives you an analytics-first approach to measuring your social media Monitor the conversations around your company in real-time based on keywords, hashtags, strategy, and equips you with the listening tools you need to add an extra layer of depth and mentions. Discover what exactly is being said, by whom, and on which platform to to your insights. It ensures that you have the control over your social media success and understand how your campaigns are resonating on social. Identify questions and problems sets the right balance needed to maximize your performance. your customers have in relation to your product, and address them on the spot.

Listening vs. Analytics 08 Gain access to the world’s largest social media and achieve all your strategic needs in one place.

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