Social listening tools vs community growth platforms
Trying to decide whether a social listening tool or community growth platform is ideal for your needs? The best choice depends on who you are and what you’re looking to accomplish.
Although there’s overlap between the two, there are some key differences to consider. Here’s how they compare and contrast.
| Features | Social listening tools | Community growth platforms |
|---|---|---|
| Integrates with B2B social platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit |  | |
| Automatically monitors community sentiment on social media | | |
| Visualizes trends and user behavior on social media over time | | |
| Surface relevant posts to enable employee advocacy and engagement | | |
| Provides a unified view of community members across social media, forums, and communication apps | | |
| Uses AI and NLP to automatically surface valuable community insights and trends | | |
| Enables end-to-end community attribution by uniting product, customer, and community data | | |
| Automatically uncovers user attributes such as company affiliation, location, title, and related social handles | | |
| Integrates with community-centric platforms such as Slack, Discord, Discourse, Khoros, Insided, and others | | |
| Allows social media managers to schedule and publish their posts | | |
| Performs reach and engagement analysis for company social posts | |
Is a social listening tool the right fit for me?
Social listening tools are ideal for tying together social media analysis with tactical execution. A social listening tool may be the right fit if you are a…
- Social media manager interested in measuring social metrics like share of voice and engagement rate.
- Marketing coordinator who wants to be able to schedule posts, direct message users, and manage paid campaigns in one place.
What types of goals can a social listening tool help me achieve?
Some of the goals that a social listening tool can help you accomplish include:
- Increase social media engagement on one or more social channels by identifying the content users enjoy based on trends and data.
- Establish a more competitive social media strategy by keeping an eye on other companies’ products, audiences, and marketing tactics.
Social listening tools excel at assisting social media teams in understanding their audience’s behavior on social media, as well as deriving insights from paid, earned, and owned social data.
Is a community growth platform the right fit for me?
Community growth platforms are ideal for providing a unified view of every member, surfacing key insights and trends, and facilitating action in response to community activity. A community growth platform may be the right fit if you are a…
- Community manager striving to activate your community with intention, facilitate growth and sustained engagement, and demonstrate the impact of community on the business.
- Developer advocate or Head of DevRel who wants to identify creative contributors and product champions, keep a finger on the pulse of how your community is feeling, and unite community, product, and customer data into a single view.
- Go-to-market leader (such as a VP of Marketing, Head of Growth, or CRO) seeking a way to make community-attributed revenue a reality and prove that community is a true growth lever.
What types of goals can a community growth platform help me achieve?
Some of the goals that a community growth platform can help you accomplish include:
- Increase community engagement and strengthen relationships with members, improving responsiveness to ensure everyone feels heard.
- Identify champions and other impactful members who can play a vital role in growing the community.
- Better understand customer wants and needs, including valuable product feedback and user insights.
- Measure community outcomes and ROI, including impact on key GTM initiatives.
Community growth platforms excel at assisting community teams in growing, managing, and measuring healthy communities at any scale while quantifying the return on community investments.
What types of goals can both tools help me achieve?
Some of the goals that either a community growth platform or a social listening tool can help you accomplish include:
- Identify key social media audiences and demographics to inform a paid media targeting strategy.
- Build a list of known influencers in the space to begin the process of relationship building, including potential partnerships for future social campaigns.
While both technologies are suitable for achieving these goals, deciding if your priority is community growth or social media management will inform your decision to purchase either a community growth platform or a social listening tool.
Get started with a community growth platform (for free)
Social listening tools and community growth platforms are both useful technologies. The solution that will better fit your needs and provide more value depends entirely on use case and unique objectives.
That said, if you are interested in harnessing the full potential of your community, a community growth platform is the best way to get a complete picture of your members’ activity and build long-lasting relationships with one another.
Sound like you? Try Common Room’s intelligent community growth platform to maximize the value of your community—and the value members receive—to drive business results.