Truly understanding your customers requires a shift from social media listening to social media intelligence.
This approach is a more human, comprehensive and proactive analysis of how digital conversations reveal consumer behaviors, perceptions and motivations. It requires a complete data set, the connection of conversations across the landscape, and a qualitative – not just quantitative – analysis of its meaning.
At the end of the day, it provides brands with an elevated understanding of consumers in real time and reveals the impact on businesses and events.
Beyond listening dashboards
Human expertise and analysis are critical components to understanding the complex patterns and emotions innate to conversations. Social media intelligence incorporates human analysis and contextual understanding on top of the data organization that a listening dashboard will provide.
The process relies on a multidisciplinary approach, pulling from journalism, marketing, data science, to tease out the thoughts, emotions, desires and motivations behind consumer decisions and trends.
A comprehensive look
Beyond mainstream platforms such as Facebook and Twitter lies a vast landscape of social networks that vary in privacy access, user behavior and content creation. Billions of conversations and opinions are shared every day on these platforms, including Reddit, Snapchat and YouTube, not to mention less obvious (and at times more controversial) ones like 4chan and Gab. In fact, conversations that bubble up from these corners can often fuel the mainstream discussions on the major platforms, so you need to stay aware.
Social media intelligence brings together conversations from disparate platforms to better understand customers and their online lives. Nearly three quarters (73 percent) of the U.S. population uses up to three social platforms, according to Pew. By connecting these conversations, businesses can glean more information and context about relevant topics, allowing them to paint a fuller picture of what’s happening.
A proactive approach
At Storyful, the origins of this approach began with our work in newsrooms – monitoring and tracking the spread of conversations to reveal the context behind breaking news stories and identify disinformation.
As businesses are increasingly facing disinformation campaigns, bot activity and digital threats meant to damage brand reputation and credibility, companies must figure out how to balance speedy communications and marketing while understanding developments in real-time. In a study by Deloitte, less than half of CEOs from companies over $1 billion lack the ability to identify and analyze reputation-impacting events.
When a company is implicated in controversy, it’s not uncommon to take to Twitter or Facebook for an official statement or public apology and then track corresponding reactions. But social media intelligence is more powerful as a proactive tool, allowing you to monitor and identify potential risks developing from the darker corners of social media. You can then take actions that put your brand in front of any reputation challenges you may face.
Conversely, social media intelligence can also be instrumental in informing engaging creative campaigns, identifying a need for a certain product in a new market, or understanding the pain points that matter to consumers. The free-wheeling nature of the conversations online creates an open environment where users share liberally on anything from skincare to personal finance to real estate advice.
Every nook and cranny of the internet can be a relevant piece in your quest to understand and best serve your audience. Understanding the signals consumers leave every day in billions of conversations is the first step to achieving social media intelligence.
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Sharb Farjami is the CEO of Storyful, a global social media intelligence agency that partners with news and business organizations to make sense of social. It is a division of News Corp. He previously served as director of content commercialization at Foxtel in Sydney, Australia.
