Social Media

Listening vs. Analytics

Whats The Difference?
Data plays an increasingly important role in social media marketing. Businesses
across industries and regions of the world are expanding their data mining
budgets, hoping to uncover insights to give them a competitive advantage.
But to get the most from data, its 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 campaigns 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
a variety of metrics, such as the engagement rate, audience growth, and posting frequency that you
can use to benchmark your company against the competitors to understand your performance in
a broader context. Analytics enable you to measure the effectiveness of your content, both organic
and promoted, to understand what works with your audiences and how successful your paid
activities are. Most importantly, analytics are the core driver in maximizing your social media ROI
by equipping you with insights needed to optimize your performance on social.
Listening, on the other hand, while lacking a comprehensive view of your social media activity,
can be effective in complementing your strategy. It allows you to monitor digital conversations
to understand what customers are saying about your company. It shows you how large your
share of voice is in comparison to your competitors. Listening is also a great customer care and
crisis management solution that enables you to discover potential problems and pain points,
and provide an appropriate response.

Its important to keep in mind that the capabilities of social listening are limited. Due to Facebook closing its API to private profiles, you can only monitor the conversations of public profiles and Pages. Instagram
is primarily a visual platform where companies are rarely being mentioned. Twitter is the only platform where social media listening is fully effective - but its user base is only a fraction of Facebooks, 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.

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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.

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 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 doesnt. 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 wouldnt 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? my owned and paid channels? Is it
Is my content good enough
Do I need to change generating the outcome desired?
that it is engaging the users
my content style or find (Filling out a form, downloading an
which I reach through my
a different format? ebook, purchasing a product, etc.)
owned and paid channels?

Engagement Reach Engagement Conversion Rate

Rate

How much of my social media These insights cannot be discovered through listening - and they
How much am I paying to generate are at the center of the success of your campaign on social media.
campaign performance is
Thats 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.

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Analytics and Listening
All in One Place
With Socialbakers Suite, you have everything you need to maximize the effectiveness
of your social media activities. From listening to analytics, you can easily access all
the key metrics you need to measure your campaigns success in one place.
Analytics
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,
and Instagram. Get a comprehensive understanding of your results, put your performance
in a competitive context, and optimize your strategy to maximize your social media ROI.
Listening
Monitor the conversations around your company in real-time based on keywords, hashtags,
and mentions. Discover what exactly is being said, by whom, and on which platform to
understand how your campaigns are resonating on social. Identify questions and problems
your customers have in relation to your product, and address them on the spot.
Summary
Both analytics and listening can be instrumental to your social media success. However,
they are intrinsically different in how they help you measure - and improve - the effectiveness
of your strategy.
Analytics allows you to gain a deeper overview of your performance across a variety
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.
Listening is a tool that can complement the data you get from analytics with additional
information. Using listening, youre able to see how people are responding to your
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.
Socialbakers Suite gives you an analytics-first approach to measuring your social media
strategy, and equips you with the listening tools you need to add an extra layer of depth
to your insights. It ensures that you have the control over your social media success and
sets the right balance needed to maximize your performance.
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