Your audience has the answer! How social media listening inspires smarter marketing strategy
Written by Jamie Hirst
Social media has been a vital component of every brand’s marketing mix for some time now.
Yet surprisingly, there are still many marketers out there who seem to underestimate its true potential. Too many of us see social media as a one-way messaging tool, when in fact it’s a powerful two-way dialogue that helps us understand our brand’s audience on a much deeper level.
Brands and marketers who use social media as a listening tool often discover key insights which help shape and adapt their social media marketing approach or wider brand strategy, increasing the potential to achieve key marketing objectives.
For these brands, social media is input, just as much as it is output! But how exactly do they go about collecting and harnessing the insights their audience is hiding?
Well, let’s start with one of my favourite examples, Guinness.
Many marketers may already be aware of the “Looks Like Guinness” campaign. In this campaign, Guinness showcased several objects which bore a resemblance to their iconic black and foamy pint. However, they tend to be less familiar with the fact that this idea stemmed from a piece of insight garnered through a technique called “social listening”.
Photographs taken by Catherine Hyland
So what is social listening?
Social listening allows marketers to scrape the internet for mentions of a particular topic, product or brand.
An experienced social media analyst would even be able to craft something called a “Boolean” (a query method that uses AND, OR, and NOT to refine search results based around a keyword), which produces a dataset composed of the most relevant mentions relating to a particular brand.
This allows us to understand exactly how social users are talking about our clients online and often helps us uncover trends and nuances to brand conversations, which sit away from social media channels.
Going back to our original example, Guinness’ search for mentions of their product uncovered a trend where some social users were pointing out examples of everyday items that looked like Guinness. If such a trend can occur organically (albeit on a very small scale), this lends support to the theory that the same concept is likely to be well-received by the broader population.
And just like that, “Looks Like Guinness” was born, contributing to a 19% increase in sales over 12 months and claiming the title of Britain’s most popular pint.
However, the benefits of social listening don’t stop there. It’s possible to dig much deeper.
To highlight just one example, many social listening tools can detect the sentiment of each social media post, determining the percentage of conversations which are positive or negative.
Tracking this over time helps identify spikes of positive or negative mentions (you can find an example of how this data is typically visualized opposite). Digging deeper into the specific posts which make up these spikes helps identify the drivers of these conversations, thus developing a more detailed understanding of our audience and informing key strategic decisions.
Examples of social listening software include Pulsar, Sprout Social, and Talkwalker. Each of these platforms do have specific benefits and drawbacks, but the basic capabilities are relatively similar.
Discovering who your audience really is!
Although social listening has its place, those wanting to gather a more detailed understanding of the specifics of their audience may want to look further afield at specific audience analysis software.
Although software of this nature typically lacks the ability to track a series of conversations in the way that social listening does, it does have the ability to build a quantitative dataset which can be used to underpin key strategic decisions.
A search which focuses on a specific brand would allow the user to understand demographics, interests, personality, channel usage, online behaviours and even highlights specific ‘clusters’ of social users who all share similar interests.
As an example, a search which focuses on a particular brand may highlight how their audience exerts a preference towards one social channel over another, informing strategic decisions such as the budget split within a paid social media strategy.
I have highlighted a few examples of the ‘clusters’ which tools of this nature have the ability to extract, in this visual here. This allows the user to develop a detailed understanding of the specific groups within their audience, allowing them to run targeted campaigns in more granular detail.
Examples of audience analysis software include Audiense and Soprism.
How do I start listening?
Audience analysis techniques which use social media have the potential to provide valuable insights which can be applied to marketing strategy.
So why wouldn’t you want to get started immediately!?
Social listening has incredible potential to provide valuable qualitative data which can be used to inspire campaign ideas. In contrast, audience analysis software can inform specific marketing decisions, such as media buying.
My advice would be to look into both options and explore the plethora of tools available for each of them.
Once you get familiar with different pieces of software, you can begin working out which ones will be most beneficial and create a bespoke blend that will unlock your audience and inform a smarter marketing strategy!
And if you’re still struggling don’t hesitate to get in touch – we’d be happy to help you understand what’s best for you.
