Three simple and effective use cases for social media intelligence in marketing from the social intelligence agency, Storyful.
Three simple and effective use cases for social media intelligence in marketing.
Jeff Perkins Executive Director, EMEA Storyful
Market research is the cornerstone of any good marketing execution. The more a marketer understands their target consumer - the logic goes - the more successful a campaign is likely to be. In fact, last year marketers spent an estimated 47 billion on research globally.
Surveys were sent out, focus groups convened, dashboards crunched numbers and trends were extrapolated. All with the singular aim of painting a clearer picture of the consumer. But, when it comes to what people are actually saying and feeling, there's a gap. Every survey limits the possible answers. Focus groups come with bias. Demographics and psychographics aren’t people and lack the nuance necessary to succeed in today’s media environment.
Social media intelligence is one of the only forms of large scale, unbiased research available to modern marketers ‒ and it’s being woefully underutilized. With the proper refinement and context, social media intelligence can inform how a brand should or should not communicate with its customer base. It can protect brands from launching irrelevant or tone-deaf campaigns or help them lean into the prevailing emotional attitudes governing popular sentiment around a given issue or event.
Here are three ways Storyful’s partners use social media intelligence to inform different facets of marketing:
1. Identifying the gap between public and brand perception: Social media analysis can quickly reveal whether a brand’s mission and goals are well-received and understood by an audience. Consumer attitudes are constantly shifting, and social media conversations reflect these changes. A brand releases one bad marketing campaign and social media will forever record the impact.
Social media intelligence can help brands identify and close potential gaps between what it strives to be and how people actually perceive it. From customer testimonials on YouTube, to employee activism on Glassdoor, what people think of a brand is available for analysis. It’s not just on your owned Facebook and Twitter channel either, it’s everywhere.
2. Producing relevant content: Insights from social media can power marketing brainstorm sessions, allowing brands to create content marketing and advertising that consumers don’t just scroll past. Social media users are constantly sharing their perceptions, fears, challenges, and frustrations. Contextualizing and analyzing these conversations enables brands to create content that speaks to consumer needs. By exhibiting a great understanding of their audiences, companies have the opportunity to use social media intelligence to increase brand authority and favourability.
Storyful recently analyzed social media conversations around air travel in the UK. By tracking consumers’ reactions to developments in the airline industry, we were able to uncover the key motivations currently driving online conversations in this space. One major factor: sustainability.
3. Identifying influential conversations: An understanding of the influences pervading a certain industry or shaping consumer perceptions offers marketers the opportunity to identify the most important conversations around a topic and address any misinformation.
Storyful’s network visualization tool Cosmos allows users to make sense of the conversations happening on Twitter and Reddit around a given topic or #hashtag. Marketers using the tool can identify the “influencers” sitting at the center of any given conversation.
That means going beyond follower count and instead identifying who the authentic voices are at the center of relevant online conversations about an industry or consumer need.
By engaging the individuals with the most influential networks in mature conversations (think: telecommunications brands responding maturely and scientifically to claims that 5G can cause cancer), or creating messaging that reaches them, brands can partake in the matters that affect society and their industry.
