A Guide To Social Listening For Market Researchers

Social media marketing listening is an invaluable tool for market researchers to reach a massive audience to obtain vital information about customer intent and market dynamics. To use social media for marketing effectively, it’s absolutely necessary that you understand your audience profile, what their expectations are, and their attitude towards brands and products, even your competitors’.

A machine learning (ML) driven social media platform helps you to this end because of its various in-built capabilities - from YouTube video analysis to text analytics - to extract the sentiment from data. These capabilities are key to the research you need to conduct, whether it’s for a new product launch, new store location, pricing changes, or online brand reputation management.

In light of the above, this guide aims to give you all the information about how you can use ML-based social media listening for marketing research and business intelligence.

What Is Social Media Marketing Listening?

Social media marketing listening is the process of extracting valuable insights from comments, posts, videos, and other content your audience posts on social media. With social listening, you can flag keywords such as brand names, specific topics, hashtags, or competitors to get a deeper understanding of what your audience says and how they feel about these aspects.

Social listening tools give you in-depth brand insights and take into account customer experience analysis for better customer-oriented marketing strategies. Based on the understanding from social media marketing listening platforms that are driven by machine learning, you can derive key market findings - all shown on an easy-to-understand customer experience dashboard.

The patterns in market trends, sentiment scores, aspect-emotion insights etc, that emerge from all this data is what helps you implement the right marketing strategies. They help you optimize advertising campaigns and ensure that you get the most return on your investment of time and money.

Why Is Sentiment Analysis Essential To Social Listening?

Sentiment analysis shows you your audience’s attitude towards your product, service, brand, and advertising content in the most in-depth manner. AI and machine learning models can process data across various social media sentiment analysis platforms including Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and others, to extract sentiment from thousands of posts, comments, and user-generated videos efficiently and quickly.

Even if you use social media surveys, machine learning platforms like Repustate IQ, will analyze the data comprising open-ended questions and extract insights to tell you important aspects that as a marketer will be invaluable to you. Thus, using sentiment analysis along with text analytics gives you more granular insights from social media data.

These results will clearly show you what percentage of people resonated with your marketing and advertising campaigns and then the specific aspects of your product or service they liked or disliked. Marketing teams need to use such kind of data-driven qualitative analysis of social metrics in order to get the true picture of how their campaigns are performing.

How Do You Use Social Listening For Market Research?

Social media marketing listening provides crucial data that a company can use to improve its brand experience as well as customer experience. This same tactic can also be used to enhance user experience in hospitality, healthcare, retail, or any other industry.

Here are 6 powerful ways market researchers can use social listening for marketing.

1. Learn Audience Intent

When using social media for marketing, you can get valuable insights about your audience’s intent so you know exactly who they are, what they like, and where they spend their time online. You can deep-dive into how they feel about certain topics and what products they’re more likely to buy. A sentiment analysis API extracts these insights through natural language processing, video content analysis, semantic clustering, and other ML tasks.

These insights help you understand your target market better and know what strategies will be most effective to reach and convert them. Ultimately, by aligning your marketing campaigns to your audience’s needs and expectations accurately, your marketing efforts will give you better results.

2. Monitor Brand Mentions

When using social listening for marketing, Repustate’s sentiment analysis platform allows you to monitor social media for any mentions of a specific brand by using keywords or hashtags. You can also find mentions of a brand without it being expressly tagged in user-generated videos, thanks to social media video content analysis.

Thus, you can monitor social platforms for brand mentions effortlessly to extract what your audience is saying. The social media listening API will extract the overall sentiment from the data so you can build marketing campaigns that are more targeted, and thus help you reduce advertising spend and increase quality leads.

3. Social Selling

When you understand how your audience feels about different things, as diverse as, music, books, movies, politics, charities, etc, you can identify opportunities to implement social selling. Social media marketing listening can get you to discover what your audience searches for on social media, what their mindset is, and what it would take to hook them. Some even liken social selling to a more slick version of multi-level marketing.In some ways, this is true. Just look at the Facebook video ads that crop up on your feed. You too can optimize a marketing strategy that places the right products in front of the right people at the right time, and thereby increase the chances of making a sale.

4. Better Content Marketing

Because social media marketing listening helps you understand what your audience prefers and what they don’t, it helps you create relevant and valuable content that resonates better with them. This helps you establish stronger consumer relationships and develop more effective advertising campaigns that are memorable.

Ultimately, social listening for marketing gives you the ability to research and discover all the facets that make your campaigns a success. Take a look at these awesome ad campaigns that were hugely successful because of how they resonated with their target market.

5. Competitor Intelligence

Apart from helping you understand who your audience is, social media marketing listening solutions also allows you to vet your competitors. You can learn where your competitors market their products or services, what campaigns they use, how your audience engages with their content, and how effective their strategies are.

Based on these insights, you can devise plans that will allow you to stand out in the market. This means, through ML-driven social listening for marketing research, you will be able to attract a wider set of customers and differentiate yourself from the crowd in a more accurate and thorough way.

6. Strategize Influencer Marketing

Social media influencers and brand ambassadors are valuable marketing avenues that companies can use to generate awareness about their brand in myriad different ways. However, when you use social media influencer marketing as a business strategy, you must ensure that influencers fit with your audience type and your brand image.

Social media marketing listening allows you to do this. By extracting valuable data from social listening content, the solution will help you identify ambassadors and influencers who will be a perfect fit for your brand. You can also analyze social metrics on a periodic basis to see the correlation between your influencer strategy and lead conversion.

Business Examples of Social Media Marketing Listening

Let’s look at some real-life business cases where companies have used social media research for their marketing needs in order to generate greater revenues and expand into new markets.

Marketing Agency

New York-based marketing agency If7 came to Repustate for a cutting-edge, intelligent social media listening solution that would help them tap into consumer sentiments. They needed TikTok insights that could help them analyze secondary conversations on the channel across various industries for clients such as Tinder, Abercrombie & Fitch, and others. The platform has helped the agency surpass client satisfaction and gain bigger clients.

Sports & Entertainment

Fan experience insights help sports leagues and teams to get better returns on investment by allowing them to offer stellar fan experiences. By gathering insights from social media listening, sports organizations are able to offer fans of all ages better in-stadium experiences, better ticketing options, food and beverage conveniences, improved app services, and much more. Read the fan experience case study.

Hospitality Industry

Repustate’s AI-enabled social media listening platform allowed hospitality marketing agency Travel Media Group to ensure that its clients get a competitive edge in the market. Through social media marketing listening, Travel Media Group was able to analyze user-generated reviews and videos on popular social media platforms and use them in their digital marketing campaigns to boost their clients’ business.

Conclusion

As a market researcher, you know that social listening can have a significant effect on a marketing campaign’s performance and effectiveness in the age of digital buying. People will almost always go online and read comments and reviews before making a purchase, whether it’s for a product or choosing an airline to fly for a vacation. Social listening for marketing helps you extract focussed insights so you can create marketing campaigns that are targeted and unique so your target audience can find you quickly and efficiently.

Repustate’s social media marketing listening solution offers quick, reliable, and accurate marketing insights. Enabled with search inside video features, robust named entity recognition, aspect-based sentiment analysis, and other capabilities, it is a perfect match if you are looking for a customizable AI-driven market research platform to drive business growth. Train the AI model to your business needs, and watch it become more and more intelligent over time.