You’ve got to know what your customers are saying about you. But there’s a fundamental issue with the majority of social listening tools: they’re just not actionable enough.
Social listening tools can provide you with so much data, it’s easy to feel like you’re drowning in it. There is so much potential locked in that data, but it’s still incredibly difficult and time-consuming to sift through it all, sort out the wheat from the chaff and analyse what’s left. So here are some social listening tips to polish your insights into a shiny action plan, and how new technologies can help you.
The limitations of social listening metrics
Social listening tools are great to measure the engagement and reactions of your activity in Social Media. However, the metrics offered up by most social listening tools merely hint at what is driving the interest and motivation of your audience.
It can be hard to infer meaning from the hard data, and efficiently convert it into an effective action plan. Here are some examples of social listening metrics, and their limitations:
Demographics
Most social listening tools incorporate demographic information such as location, age, and gender.
The issue with focusing on demographic information is that it can lead you to make decisions based on stereotypes and bias. How many times have you been frustrated by an advertising campaign clearly targeted at your age group and gender, to which you have no interest whatsoever? We all have that YouTube ad repeated to us again and again based, most likely, on our demographic profile.
Engagement
Social listening tools track engagement over time and across different social media platforms. This is indisputably useful to track the success of a campaign or product launch. However, instead of simply tracking a line going up and down, it would be far more useful to understand the motivation behind this engagement. Why do certain posts have better acceptance and results than others?
In an attempt to answer this question, some social tools offer word clouds to illustrate which words are most commonly used in association with your brand. This can be helpful, but it can be difficult to extract useful insights from single words in isolation and out of context.
Brand sentiment
Brand sentiment analysis is crucial to enable you to understand what people are saying about your brand.
With most social listening tools, brand sentiment analysis is fairly rudimentary. The social listening tool will isolate positive and negative words based on a predefined glossary and use that information to tell you the mood around your brand or product. However, like word clouds, single words in isolation and out of context can be misleading and don’t paint a full picture of the sentiment of your audience and your customers.
Social listening tips to turn data into a plan of action
Advancements in AI and Psycholinguistic technology are revolutionizing what’s possible with social listening tools.
Psychology helps us to understand the reasoning behind consumer behaviour , what subconsciously drives consumers to purchase a product or a service. This means marketing activities are more likely to be consumer-centric when they integrate psychological insights.
At Symanto we care about people’s opinions, emotions, and motivations. We strongly advocate brands to do so as well to enhance their connection with their customers, improve brand advocacy and customer retention. Technology needs to have a more human way to interact with our society. That´s why we have developed psychology AI models that understand human personalities, drivers, and barriers in social media.
Use Symanto’s tools to help you turn your social listening data into practical and actionable tips.
1. Segment your audience accurately
Instead of producing broad, demographic data, Psychology AI helps on clustering your audience into more comprehensive segments based on their distinctive psychological traits. It then delivers clear guidance to optimize your communication strategy to cater to each segment.
2. Fine-tune your messaging based on personality traits
Personality is what drives consumer behaviour . Knowing your customers helps you not only build a bond with them but also to predict the success of different marketing initiatives and in general your marketing strategy and product development.
3. Follow directives from your audience
While the majority of social listening tools only detect topics in a high-level and generic way, our text intelligence detects all relevant topics in actual conversations organically to find “hidden gems” in the long-tail conversations. These insights can essentially amount to your audience telling you what they want from you, and what changes you can make.
4. Make decisions with more accurate results
Social conversation can be extremely noisy, so accuracy is the key to real insights. Our proprietary NLP (Natural Language Processing) technology surfaces audience opinion and sentiment towards the exact topic discussed, and not just on the post level.
5. Focus on your business’ needs and KPIs
With Symanto, you can get customized reports, where each report and dynamic dashboard are adapted to your specific business needs & KPIs so that you get the information that most pertains to your business goals.
Fully leverage the power of social listening by following these tips in conjunction with Symanto’s suite of products. We guide you with onboarding and consultancy to help you interpret the data, get to grips with psychographic segments, and tailor messages on the deepest level.
Get in touch or book a free personalised demo to find out how our insights platform can enhance your social listening capabilities and enable you to develop an action plan to advance your business.
