Why brands need to expand their social listening strategy to understand trends, audience behavior and cultural shifts for marketing success.

Social listening is more than keeping tabs on who's saying what about your brand. It's a look into your customer's behavior, industry trends, and cultural shifts. Done right it can be not only a powerful tool for your brand's marketing success, but it can lead to a more engaged and loyal customer base.

What is Social Listening?

The term "social listening" is a real buzzword in marketing these days. Brands have gotten tied up in analyzing online conversations about their products, treating it like a google search. They've missed out on where the real value of social media lies — uncovering relevancy and moments of opportunity. Social listening should extend beyond brand mentions or channels and into your industry/audience as a whole. It's about monitoring and analyzing all social media content relevant to your brand, not only those who directly mention your brand in a post.

There are many tools out there looking to capitalize on this buzzword. Sprinklr, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite are a few of the big players in the game. They boast big claims too saying they know "what people are saying about your brand" and can even tell you "what your audience thinks, feels, and wants". This is all very alluring, it's exactly what a brand wants to know about their customer, but it's not entirely true.

Social Listening Limitations

1. Accuracy issues. Language is not easy to track, there are a lot of nuances there. Tracking brand sentiment, how people feel about your brand based on what they're saying, can become frustrating when taking into account things like sarcasm or context. How is a computer program supposed to understand the minutiae that is today's internet slang?
2. Data Scope: Tracking a brand's perception with social listening is hard when you don't have access to everything people are saying about your brand. Because of obvious (and also very good and necessary) user data protections on social platforms the volume of data pulled into these tools is limited. A tool can look at public discussions but doesn't have access to any private conversations.
3. Privacy and Access: Platforms like Meta and TikTok don't give tools access to what's being said in native posts, only allowing tracking via hashtags. This means people need to be using a hashtag for that conversation to be pulled into a report. Conversations between two profile pages on Facebook are also not trackable, only content posted in specified groups can be pulled into a report.

The right way to go about social listening.

So what's the use of social listening if platforms limit what can be viewed? Remember the key to social listening is going beyond brand mentions. Social listening should be used to understand the broader social landscape your brand lives within. It's about trends, broad public sentiments, competitor actions, and culture shifts within your industry. This information is more valuable than simply focusing on who's mentioned your brand's name. Social listening can also be used to understand how your customers interact with each other and other brands on social platforms. This shows how they think, and what they care about and helps when trying to connect via your brand.

Two success stories.

1. Starbucks and the Unicorn Frappuccino: Back in 2017 the coffee giant released the Unicorn Frappuccino. The bright pink and blue drink capitalized on the unicorn-themed food trend which was viral on social media at the time. It was only available for a few days, but still managed to cause a big stir on social media. This not only helped boost sales but attracted a significant amount of food traffic to stores.

1. McDonald's and the Szechuan Sauce: McDonald's re-released its Szechuan sauce, a promotional item from 1998, in limited quantities after it appeared in the popular TV show "Rick and Morty". The show's reference to the sauce had fans clamoring for its return. A limited release combined with the pop culture connection caused long lines and widespread media coverage, proving their social listening paid off.

How can marketing teams integrate social listening into their larger market research?

Start by taking a broad look at your industry as a whole. Look for social trends that may relate to your industry, as well as what types of content seem to be performing well. It's all about taking these learnings and building them into your brand's future content. Next take a look at the competitive landscape, again think broadly throughout your industry. Look at what they're doing well and where they could improve. These are all things you can do with help from social listening tools, but can also be done natively within each social platform. Category insights may not change much from year to year, but ongoing learning is still necessary. Keep monitoring and adapting to new trends and technologies as they come along.

TLDR;

Social listening can be truly beneficial for your brand if it extends beyond mere brand monitoring. It should analyze all relevant social media content to capture industry trends, audience behaviors, and broader social discussions. Social listening tools oftentimes have accuracy issues and data access limitations due to privacy regulations on platforms, but when done right social listening can offer substantial strategic value. It can provide insights into public sentiments, competitor strategies, and cultural shifts, allowing brands to proactively refresh their marketing strategies. When brands start to observe and adjust to industry-wide trends and analyze their competitive landscapes, they enhance their connection with customers. Building a stronger, more connected community for their brand.

— Emily Michka, Social Strategist @ space150