Help with SMM Course -What is the Difference between Social Media Marketing and Social Media Monitoring?

[Ramen4Dayz]

I am going to try to keep this as brief as possible, but the way I see it:

**Social media marketing:** gives you access to a network that allows you to promote your brand using a variety of growth tactics, both paid and unpaid. With FB Ads, Twitter Ads, etc. you can promote posts to increase exposure and essentially buy your way to a broader audience. You can also respond to people who engage with your brand. Primary objectives include increasing brand awareness and driving site traffic.

**Search engine marketing:** This all takes place on search. You bid on specific keywords (you can determine which keywords to target using a tool like ahrefs or the Google Adwords keyword tool) and you are boosting exposure to your brand exclusively on the search results pages. This is to not get confused with SEO, which is a separate long-tail process that pushes your brand higher up in search results in a much more organic way. SEM is totally paid. People are seeking things when searching, so it has a more linear customer journey, whereas social media marketing is more about discoverability and inserting your message in the right place at the right time.

**Social monitoring:** This has a much more analytical focus (although SMM and SEM do, too). You are essentially tracking and evaluating what people are saying about your brand. It also gives you insight as to whether your campaigns are successful – you’ll get an overall sense of virality. If you find that people are saying certain things, social monitoring is the process in which you identify what those things are, and gives you a path to engage in those conversations.

[cieracan]

Social Media Marketing is about developing a strategy to keep your business top of mind for your followers by putting out content that appeals to your audience and encourages engagement such as reviews, comments, likes, and posts to your page, etc. so that your content will show up in your followers feeds and their followers feeds on a regular basis. It’s also about using paid ads on those platforms to reach a broader audience that matches your ideal customer either by demographic, proximity, or interest using content with a call to action appealing enough to make them either come in to your business, purchase online, or use a service that you provide. In a nutshell.

Search Engine Marketing is paid advertising and pay-per-click advertising on search engines like Google, for instance if you pay for a PPC ad, Google will place your business at the top when someone searches for your type of business/service/product with a little ad indicator for as long as you are paying for the ad and then each time someone clicks on that ad they charge you a fee. This is meant to increase visibility with the goal of increasing your chances of being seen and ultimately clicked through to your website at the exact time that a potential client is looking for you or what you offer/provide. (This is different than Search Engine Optimization)

Social Media Monitoring is just like it sounds. You monitor the conversations going on. You monitor trends. You monitor your own reputation. You monitor your competitors, and others in the industry to see what’s working. You will track content, engagement, hashtags, keywords, times of day when your followers tend to be online and non followers that could be potential clients, etc. You monitor basically anything that could potentially help you develop better campaigns on those platforms and increase ROI.