Social Media Monitoring vs Moderation: What’s the Difference?

They sound alike, but social media monitoring and social media moderation achieve different results. Both are critical in managing online communities. While their names imply a laser focus on social networks, the entire web should be included. Do you understand the potential behind content moderation and looking for mentions?

Social Media Monitoring vs Moderation

Social media monitoring is similar to “social media listening.” Listening goes a bit further, because it’s about hearing and processing what your customers, potential consumers, and target audience all have to say rather than merely tracking what’s been said. It goes beyond scouring for mentions of your brand; it’s about everything that’s relevant to your brand. Listening is a doorway toward enlightenment and innovation, as well as engagement and marketing.

On the flipside, media moderation is about being on top of all those social mentions on sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It’s about getting involved in the discussion or knowing when a rogue blogger posts a harsh takedown of your restaurant, or escalating harassment on YouTube. When someone praises your brand, knowing that is valuable. Plus, it’s an opportunity to capitalize on user-generated content.

We excel at offering both these services. Just ask Smucker’s, for whom we monitor 19 brands across 53 channels. But it’s a big world out there, so that’s why we’re on top of social media platforms around the world, in 30+ languages. Are you protecting your brand the best you can? We can help.

Monitoring Social Media

Listening to social media accounts, whether it’s regional or global, is the first step in managing your brand. By using social media monitoring tools, like our proprietary SocialPatrol, you can see all mentions of your brand and use the opportunity to engage and join the discussion.

According to Sprout Social, approximately 35% of consumers prefer reaching out to brands through social media. They’re pretty patient, too, because they feel a great response time is anything up to four hours. Unfortunately, most brands aren’t on top of their social media accounts as well as they could or should be and they take an average of 10 hours to reply. And some don’t even have weekend coverage, with replies taking literally days.

Being aware of what’s being said, acknowledging it, engaging with the users, and even solving their problems are all behaviors that resonate beyond that one-to-one interaction. Where many brands fall short, though, is in thinking @mentions are the only content they need to monitor. Many consumers won’t tag the company, so finding and engaging with them is another part of monitoring. And what if they’ve misspelled the brand, or only used a product name?

With a great tool like SocialPatrol, missed tags, misspellings, and product mentions are not a problem. What’s great, too, is how quickly those mentions are spotted. Unlike something like Google Alerts, where the web is scoured once a day, real-time monitoring makes all the difference – especially when consumers hope to hear back from you in under four hours.

Moderating Social Media

In today’s multimodal web, it’s critical to monitor not just social media mentions, but videos and photographs posted too. It’s easy to see the potential in engaging and observing conversations around your brand and rocking all things YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but what about proactively heading off any potential crisis? Our moderation teams are fantastic at crisis management in real time.

For moderation to be comprehensive, it needs to happen around the clock. That’s why our teams cross all time zones and cultures, allowing us to guarantee 24/365 coverage. A crisis doesn’t just happen between 9 and 5, and it’s not always in English, either. With our multi-lingual team working with a variety of technology and always being on, we’re our clients’ eyes and ears at all hours. That’s why we’re so versatile and proactive when it comes to crisis management and protecting our brands.

Moderation also means being informed about who your top brand advocates are and being able to share user-generated content for more potentially-free social media exposure for your brand.

Different, but Equally Important

Social media monitoring, listening, and moderation all yield slightly different results, but together they make for a powerful online marketing program. It’s never been more important to be a part of the conversation, and that’s what these tools accomplish. Doing these things well puts you directly in the room with people using your brand around the world. Talk to us about how we can up your social game with a winning strategy to truly build your online communities.