Social media has democratized access to medical information and empowered patients to take charge of their health. But it also has negative consequences. Like increasing the spread of misinformation and excluding healthcare workers from vital conversations with their patients. It has pushed some hospital systems, professional societies and pharmaceutical companies into an unflattering limelight, as patient and provider criticisms go viral. Risks like this have caused healthcare organizations to recoil, and grow cautious of being present on social channels.

The reality is that the future of the healthcare industry will be a hybrid of online and offline experiences. People will use social media networks to look up health information, find care providers, search for employment and receive updates from their healthcare team and hospital systems. They expect you to show up on social—and social data can provide value for your company, too.

By using social listening tools, you can keep an eye on trending conversations in your community, stay ahead of crises and receive real-time patient feedback that helps you improve your care. Keep reading for examples of social listening for healthcare in action.

The benefits of social listening in healthcare

The sheer volume of social content published hourly makes it tough for healthcare companies to find their patients, providers and community members. Social listening enables you to cut through the noise, hone in on relevant conversations and share valuable timely insights with your leadership team.

Here are specific ways teams can use listening to monitor and analyze audience conversations in an efficient, centralized manner, featuring advice from Sprout Social experts.

Proactive crisis management

The best things a social team can do when it comes to responding to an impending crisis are: already have a crisis plan in place and catch minor crises before they spiral out of control. According to Jill Florence, Director of Enterprise Sales at Sprout Social, “Unfortunately, PR crises are common for healthcare systems and other healthcare organizations. Many have gone through a challenging event themselves, or have seen it happen to other companies and they’re afraid of it happening to them. Whether it’s a patient who had a negative experience, a violent threat or mishandling patient data, leaders want to know about it in real-time.”

Of course, crises can be external, too. Katherine Van Allen, a Senior Solutions Engineer at Sprout, adds, “Healthcare organizations can also use listening to pay attention to government decisions, relevant current events and specific bills and or lobbying conversations that will impact care units beyond the marketing team.”

By including Sprout Social tools like Listening Spike Alerts in your crisis plan, you will be alerted to shifts in conversations around topics like your hospitals, facilities or supply chain, plus trending news. These alerts will help your team stay on top of current events, and be the first to know if a crisis is about to unfold. As Florence explains, “You don’t want to be in a situation where the CEO is the one informing you about a situation, and you’re just reacting. Getting listening alerts right away is critical to proactively managing crises, and leading the charge at your organization.”

Real-time patient and clinician feedback

While receiving feedback from patients and clinicians on social might seem daunting, it’s the best way to source unfiltered intel. By intercepting this feedback, the social team accesses voice of customer knowledge that can help improve multiple aspects of your organization.

With social listening insights on hand, it’s possible to understand the needs, opinions and feelings of patients, physicians and community members. And understanding them translates to better content, care, and recruitment and retention strategies. As Van Allen puts it, “The [healthcare organizations] who use social listening make more informed decisions about their content strategy.”

By making brand health a part of your listening strategy, you can consistently monitor audience sentiment on social. A platform like Sprout enables you to visualize overall sentiment trends and zero-in on key audience pain points. With this presentation-ready business intelligence, you’re empowered to share audience feedback—like how patients feel about your current wait times and the care they receive, to how physicians would describe your culture—with the rest of your organization.

“Comparative” intelligence

In the healthcare industry, it’s common to consider other healthcare systems and companies “comparators” rather than competitors. While you might not consider other organizations your direct competition, you can still use them as a barometer to measure your performance—from patient care and satisfaction to talent recruitment and culture.

Van Allen describes, “Use listening to understand your share of voice and how people are talking about comparators. Ask yourself: What kinds of specialties, hiring conversations and patient feedback are they getting? How does that compare to us?”

This is especially helpful amid an industry-wide staffing shortage and quickly evolving patient expectations. “The hiring landscape is so competitive that customers need to understand why other companies are being chosen over them,” says Florence. Social listening delivers key learnings that can help you reach (and exceed) care benchmarks on social and beyond, and rethink how your company approaches hiring and workplace culture overall.

Sprout’s Competitive Analysis report aggregates social data from your comparators, including impressions, engagements, sentiment and overall share of voice. You can dig deeper into specific audience feedback in the Conversation and Messages tabs.

5 examples of social listening for healthcare in action

We researched examples of ways real healthcare companies use social listening to increase patient satisfaction and engagement, while balancing growing needs around hiring and patient care standards. Here’s what we found:

1. Guide expansion

As hospital systems and other healthcare organizations expand, real-time audience feedback gleaned from social listening empowers marketing teams to provide a strategic vision.

Florence cites a specific example of a hospital system she worked with that used customer feedback from social listening to guide expansion. “They were completely maxed out. They didn’t have large enough facilities or enough clinicians to accommodate their community, and they felt the backlash on social. Customers complained about long wait times, poor physician care and overall bad experiences. As their company increased capacity, the social team was on the front lines. They managed customer pain points and kept decision makers abreast, while using that feedback to influence expansion in a way that maintained positive brand reputation long-term.”

2. Provide audiences with relevant content

Social listening insights give you a window into issues that matter to your patients, community members and physicians, and enable you to craft an audience-centric content strategy.

Van Allen describes how organizations can use listening to adapt their messaging to meet the needs of their audience. “We see healthcare organizations use social listening to research trending conversations and industry topics, and use that intel to inform their content strategy. For example, a hospital system could create a Listening topic about going “back to school” and surface that parents within their community want more tips to prepare for cold, flu and RSV season.”

3. Route audience intel to the right department

At some healthcare organizations, multiple social marketing teams work together—each representing a different department (e.g., cardiology, dermatology, oncology, etc.). Using a robust and intuitive platform like Sprout makes it possible for these teams to share social listening insights with one another, and facilitate stronger communication and cross-team collaboration.

Florence adds, “Using Sprout’s custom Listening reports lets healthcare marketers generate and share insights with other functions.” By creating department-specific Listening topics, social marketers at healthcare organizations—like hospital systems—can find the specific insights they need to reach their unique goals, like increasing cardiology patient satisfaction. Sprout’s centralized platform houses all of this data in one place, making it possible for marketing teams to work in harmony.

4. Track awareness campaigns

Healthcare organizations can use social listening to gauge how effective promotional campaigns for emerging research and timely initiatives are.

For example, a medical society specializing in cardiology ran a major awareness campaign centered around American Heart Month. To measure the performance and impact of their work, they created a listening query around their organization name and the branded campaign hashtag. By analyzing this Listening data, they were able to identify key strengths and weaknesses of the campaign, resulting in valuable strategy refinements for upcoming initiatives.

You can also use listening data to find advocates who were vocal during a past campaign, and tap them for future partnerships.

5. Increase share of voice

Listening is a valuable tool for healthcare organizations who want to improve their credibility and rise up to the level of other comparators.

In one instance, a children’s hospital looking to raise its national ranking through strategic media opportunities created a competitive listening topic to track its share of voice against higher-ranking hospitals. While analyzing the Listening data, they identified opportunities for submission-based awards and event sponsorships that might help bolster their reputation. They also established new competitive benchmarks for engagements and impressions.

In healthcare, you hope that people never need certain services (especially emergency/urgent care). But you do want to be top of mind, in the moment, when they do.

Social listening shows your audience you care

Your audience expects healthcare brands like yours to be present on social media. Despite its reputational and compliance risks, social offers a wide variety of insights that enable you to manage crises effectively, gather real-time patient and provider feedback, and stay on par with your comparators.

Finding value in social as a healthcare organization requires tools that capture actionable insights and mine value from social to drive exceptional patient and provider experiences.

Want to start turning social data into elevated patient care? Request a demo of Sprout Social’s Listening solution today.

The post The power of social listening for healthcare organizations appeared first on Sprout Social.

• 60% of customers will switch to a competitor after a negative experience.
• 73% of customers want companies to recognize their unique needs and expectations.
• 52% of customers expect an answer within an hour of posting on a brand’s digital page.

As a business, you need to figure out how to deliver great customer experiences while keeping up with these changing demands.

Part of that equation is understanding how customers think and feel about your brand. That’s what sentiment analysis is all about.

In this post, you’ll learn what customer sentiment analysis is, why it matters and how to do it right. We’ve also included helpful tips and tools to get you started on the right foot.

Table of Contents

• What is customer sentiment analysis?
• Why do you need to analyze customer sentiment?
• How to measure customer sentiment
• Best tools for customer sentiment analysis
• How to improve customer sentiment

What is customer sentiment analysis?

Customer sentiment analysis is a facet of AI marketing that involves understanding how customers think and feel about your products, services or business.

When a customer leaves a review, comments on your posts or shares a photo with your product, they’re expressing an emotion—such as joy, frustration or disappointment.

As a brand, your job is to decipher that emotion, paint an accurate picture of the customer experience and then use that insight to improve future experiences.

Why do you need to analyze customer sentiment?

Sentiment analysis is an integral part of delivering an exceptional AI customer experience. It helps you understand the nuances of emotion that drive satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.

Here are five ways analyzing customer sentiment can help your business:

Monitor overall customer satisfaction

Happy customers leave good reviews. Unhappy customers leave bad reviews.

Sounds easy, right? But it’s not that simple. Sometimes, you need to read between the lines.

For example, if your app’s review section is quiet after a new update, sentiment analysis might reveal users are unimpressed, not overjoyed.

By capturing the emotional undertones in customer feedback and conversations, businesses can gauge satisfaction levels with greater accuracy.

Improve customer experience

Sentiment analysis offers actionable insights that can help you craft experiences tailored to the emotional needs of your customers.

For example, you might identify that customers find your landing page confusing. Writing clearer copy and fixing the design can help you improve user experience on your website and generate more sign ups for your business.

Understanding customer sentiment also lets you create targeted campaigns around topics customers feel strongly about and respond to feedback more empathetically, which improves their overall experience with your brand.

Gain real-time consumer insights

Sentiment analysis can help you capture instant feedback during product launches and campaigns. This allows you to react promptly, preventing issues from snowballing.

For example, let’s say a video game company drops a new game and monitors social media and gaming forums for player reactions. Within hours, they detect a pattern of complaints about a difficult level, which is causing players to lose interest.

Acting on these real-time insights, the company releases a patch to adjust the difficulty settings and posts tips for navigating the challenging sections. By doing so, they prevent early negative reviews from damaging the game’s reputation.

Build brand loyalty

Understanding what makes your customers tick helps you turn moderately satisfied buyers into loyal advocates of your business. Here’s how.

By identifying emotional triggers, you can create targeted campaigns around topics they feel strongly about, respond more effectively to feedback and keep delighting customers at every step of the journey.

Not only will customers have a great experience with your brand, they’ll appreciate you going the extra mile to exceed their expectations and bring them joy. As a result, you’ll reduce churn and keep them coming back for more.

Identify product and service gaps

Monitoring customer sentiment can highlight areas of your product or service that may need improvement or innovation.

For example, you might notice complaints on social media about the poor battery life of your tech product. You could roll out an update to fix the issue and potentially avert a drop in sales. Better yet, you could focus on improving the battery of your future products.

How to measure customer sentiment

You know sentiment analysis is important, but how do you actually do it? How do you measure the general emotion surrounding your brand?

It might sound complicated, but it’s really not. You just need to gather the right data and organize it in a way that makes it easier to interpret and act upon.

Which factors contribute to customer sentiment?

Before we get to the steps, let’s find out what type of data you need to measure customer sentiment about your brand. Here are some factors that affect sentiment:

• Customer reviews: Online reviews of your company, products and services contain various emotions expressed via text and/or visuals. They can be positive, negative or neutral, and these nuances are often picked up by AI sentiment analysis tools. Managing these reviews with productive solutions can help your brand improve trust among customers and lower the negative impact of online criticism.

• Brand reputation: On social media, every like, comment or post shapes your brand’s public perception. A viral post can make you popular, while a critical tweet can spark backlash. It’s an up-to-date snapshot of how much people like or dislike your brand.
• News: Whether it’s an award, a product recall or a CEO’s statement, news can significantly impact how customers perceive a brand.
• Marketing initiatives: When your campaigns resonate, they lift positive sentiment; when they miss the mark, they can confuse or even alienate your audience.
• Cognitive dissonance: When customers’ experiences don’t align with their expectations, it creates discomfort known as cognitive dissonance. This psychological phenomenon can lead to negative sentiment if not addressed.
• Competitive landscape: Customers always compare, and so your standing in the market—your prices, quality, innovation—all contribute to how they feel about your brand in the context of your competition.

These drivers can all influence how customers feel about a brand, and it’s important to track them all in order to get a complete picture of customer sentiment.

3 steps to analyze customer sentiment

Now you know what to look for. But how do you go about analyzing this data? Follow the three steps below for a systematic and organized approach to conducting sentiment analysis:

Step 1: Gather the data

First, you need raw material to work with—that means collecting brand-related information from every corner where your customers might express their thoughts.

This could range from online reviews and social media posts to customer support tickets and survey responses. Gathering diverse data sources gives you a well-rounded view of customer sentiment, not just isolated snapshots.

Step 2: Process the data

Next, you’ll need to sift through the data and prepare it for analysis.

This is where sentiment analysis tools can help. AI-powered algorithms can sort positive from negative, and suss out those tricky neutral comments.

This step involves decoding the tone and intent behind words, which requires sophisticated technology, like natural language processing (NLP), to capture subtleties and context.

Step 3: Visualize the data

Finally, you’ve got to make sense of all this information. Data visualization tools can transform your findings into charts, graphs and heat maps that highlight sentiment trends.

This step is crucial because it translates complex data into a format that’s easy for teams to understand and use, turning insights into action points for improving customer experience.

Best tools for customer sentiment analysis

Measuring customer sentiment can be tricky as it’s not exactly a quantifiable metric.

Thankfully, there are some powerful sentiment analysis tools out there to help you navigate the complexities in gauging customer experience and extracting actionable insights.

Here are three sentiment analysis tools you can use:

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management platform that offers sentiment analysis as part of its AI-powered social listening capabilities.

Refine your strategy by exploring customers’ feelings, thoughts and opinions on specific topics, competitors, products and more. Sprout gives you a visual score summarizing the average sentiment around your brand as well as a graph tracking sentiment trends over time.

Lexalytics

Lexalytics is a text analytics platform that helps you analyze sentiment by examining customer feedback across multiple channels. It evaluates the tone and emotion in the text to determine the sentiment behind customer opinions.

MeaningCloud

MeaningCloud offers sentiment analysis by processing multilingual content from various channels. It breaks down feedback into sentiments associated with specific topics or attributes of your products and services.

How to improve customer sentiment

Analyzing sentiment is just the beginning. You also need to know how to make customers fall in love with your brand.

Improving customer sentiment requires a strategic approach to evaluating customer experience and taking advantage of AI customer service tools. Here’s what to do:

Define the scope

Before you can improve sentiment, you need to know where to listen. Are your customers voicing their opinions on X (formerly Twitter), reviewing on Google or asking questions on live chat?

Pinpoint these channels and decide if there are specific regions or languages that need attention. For instance, if your product is hitting a new market, you’ll want to tune into that area’s local review sites and social platforms.

Defining the scope provides a targeted area for your efforts so you don’t cast too wide a net and dilute your impact.

Monitor the sentiment

Next, use sentiment analysis tools to continuously monitor these channels.

By tracking sentiment over time, you can spot trends and understand how customers are reacting to every little change.

For example, if sentiment dips every time you release a software update, there’s a clue to improve your change management process.

Identify the topics or themes

Leverage AI to dig into the feedback to find what’s really stirring up emotions. Is it your stellar customer service, or perhaps shipping delays are causing grief?

Identifying these topics helps you know where to double down and where to pivot. For example, if multiple customers express frustration over a specific product feature, that’s a clear signal you need to make improvements.

Create a strategy

Finally, develop a strategy based on these insights. Allocate your resources where they’ll make the biggest difference. Maybe it’s time to staff up your customer service team or invest in an AI chatbot to provide instant responses.

Also, determine the best channels for customer interaction—perhaps your audience engages more on Instagram than email—and tailor your approach accordingly.

Remember to train your team so they understand the importance of sentiment and how to nurture positive experiences at every touchpoint.

Using sentiment analysis to improve customer experience

What your customers think about your business directly influences its growth and success. Instead of just reading reviews, you need to dive deeper and understand the nuances of emotion to accurately monitor sentiment around your brand.

With customer sentiment analysis, you can get inside your customers’ minds, leverage emotional triggers and craft experiences that delight them at every step.

Sprout Social’s listening lets you track customer sentiment, conversations, behavior and trends across multiple social media platforms with the power of AI and machine learning.

Interested in learning more? Schedule a personalized demo and learn how to drive real business growth with Sprout’s platform.

The post How to analyze customer sentiment to improve customer experience appeared first on Sprout Social.

And social listening can unearth these game-changing insights…if you know how to use it. Listening is like mining social data to get to the buried gold insights, so you can put social data into action.

While there’s no denying the value and power of social listening, a tool this impactful can make it feel intimidating to get started. In this article, we’ll take you through 6+ social media listening examples and the strategies real brands use to inspire you to get more from listening.

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6 social media listening examples and strategies to help you mine for insights

To start excavating deeper insights for your brand, you need to fill your toolbox with the right strategies and approaches. Check out these social media listening examples employed by other brands to start building your social listening strategy and playbook.

Find relevant and authentic influencers for partnerships

According to a Q3 Sprout Social Pulse Survey of 307 marketers, 81% of respondents say influencer marketing is an essential piece of their social strategy. And this trend is likely to continue.

Social listening can help you unearth relevant influencers to partner with. This was particularly helpful for software company Goally. Including stories of real parents and families using their products is a vital part of their social content strategy—especially on TikTok. By using Sprout’s Social Listening solution, Goally’s social team connected with relevant influencers who had a major impact on their growth.

As Goally’s Marketing Manager Kaelyn Brooks told Sprout, “During our first few influencer initiatives on TikTok, we saw the number of users on our website with intent to buy increase by about 4%.”

Listening even helped them find an influencer who connected them with an entire pool of other relevant influencers and creators.

Apply it: Half of marketers say they choose influencers who are already genuine fans of their product, according to the same Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey. Social listening can help you uncover influencers who already love your products to create authentic partnerships.

Use the Messages tab in Sprout’s Social Listening interface to find relevant messages. Sort messages by the follower count of the publisher or engagements to easily find top influencers to partner and engage with.

Goally uses Sprout Social Listening to find smaller creators organically, and invites them to join their affiliate program. “It’s also helpful to make sure we’re engaging and commenting on the popular posts for brand awareness in general,” Kaelyn tells us.

Learn how people feel about your brand, products and content

To understand brand health, you must demystify how your audience feels about you and your products. This is especially important when your company makes big moves.

One computer software company uses Sprout Listening to measure sentiment around their brand and products ahead of rebranding. With Listening, they uncover keywords people use about their current brand, and the social conversation after the brand shift. This has empowered them to understand associations with their existing brand, and the impact post-rebrand in the social space.

Measuring sentiment can also help brands establish an overall baseline to answer the question, “how do people feel about us, and has that changed?” Without social listening, it’s tough to understand whether your brand sentiment has spiked or dipped. Another computer software company regularly uses listening to understand their overall brand sentiment. By doing so, they recognize when a dip or a spike in sentiment occurs, and they can dig into specific conversations to help them unpack the change.

Apply it: Be the first to know if sentiment around your brand is rising or falling. Start with a bird’s eye view—in Sprout, the Sentiment Summary presents a clear data visualization of your sentiment from conversational analytics for a chosen date range, including where dips or spikes occurred.

Then, dig in further. Get an idea of what caused spikes or dips on specific days with the sentiment summary message explorer. Click into dips or spikes on the Sentiment Trends chart to surface messages that contributed to changes in sentiment over time.

And to get granular down to the keyword level, Sprout’s Word Cloud feature visualizes the common keywords used in the conversation around the topic or topics you’re listening for. Click into any of these words to further filter them, or to explore messages that use them and their sentiment.

Find new ways to improve engagement, awareness and content

Engagement metrics on your owned content tell you what you’re getting right. But listening can inspire and inform new content that resonates.

This is especially important for brands with multiple events or locations. You won’t see every post, activation or article about the many branches of your org with basic monitoring. But social listening zooms out to surface stories and news you may have missed.

For example, a fundraising organization was struggling to source stories from the many fundraising groups, locations and events under their umbrella. They were missing opportunities to share the wider impact of their organization.

Sprout’s Listening solution provided a way for them to sort and track stories and mentions across locations and fundraising groups. They could follow specific topics and keywords and measure how much of the conversation those topics took up, engagements they drove and more.

But engagement is about more than just content: it’s about connecting with your target audience in conversations that matter most to them. Doing so can build community and brand awareness.

Listening also enables you to surface relevant conversations beyond those you’re tagged in. This can help you grow brand awareness by jumping into relevant conversations. One company in the health insurance industry makes their name known by doing exactly that—whether or not they’re mentioned. They use social listening to keep tabs on conversations surrounding health and wellness topics. This saves them time scouring the social space to source those conversations.

The result? They were able to grow their thought leadership presence and community by joining more conversations that mattered to their target audience.

Apply it: Customers often get stuck when building their listening queries. But crafting smarter queries is key to ensuring you’re getting the most impactful listening experience and unearthing conversations and stories that matter.

Here are a few tips to craft a query that sets your listener up for success:

When adding inclusions…

• Start with the basics, including the main keywords you want to listen for (think brand name, products, etc.), hashtags and X (formerly known as Twitter) handles that are important to you.
• Add alternate spellings, grammatical errors and misspellings of your brand and product names.
• Think about other social handles and hashtags to include that people may mention next to your own.
• Add your website links.

When adding exclusions…

• Use the Topic Preview—this will show you any unwanted content and noise in the conversation and can guide exclusions to filter your results.
• Find and exclude any social handles that are adding to the noise.
• Lean on pre-built noise exclusion options.

Identify potential crises and track sentiment for negative spikes

Detecting potential brand crises early is one of the primary use cases for social listening. By monitoring negative chatter, sentiment shifts and spikes in specific topics, teams can detect conversation shifts early and prepare a response more proactively.

This is especially important for highly regulated industries. For example, one company uses listening as part of their financial services risk mitigation strategy after they experienced a data incident. While the incident was not recent, executives wanted to monitor conversations around it. So the team set up their listening solution to track conversations around relevant keywords—think: “breach” and “litigation.” This way, they keep their finger on the pulse of the conversation, and they’re the first to know if the story picks up traction again.

While one company uses listening to stay proactive, another used listening to keep tabs on an ongoing industry crisis for their clients. An agency in the building and manufacturing industry had a client that was impacted by COVID-caused product delays. They used listening to follow the digital conversation around the supply chain crisis, to understand how consumers were reacting and to inform how they should navigate the chatter.

Conversations like these could easily go undetected if teams relied only on mentions. With listening, they can keep their finger on the pulse of the conversation, guide their response and detect crucial shifts.

Apply it: Use some of the methods we’ve talked about in these social media listening examples so far to listen for keywords and monitor sentiment and conversations that keep you ahead of brand crises.

Get intel to stay ahead of the competition

As the revised old saying goes: keep your friends close, and your competitors closer. To stay ahead, you need to keep one eye on what you’re doing and another on what competitors are doing—which social listening does within seconds.

One agency uses social listening to create smarter pitches against competitors. Using social listening, they’ll look into new services their competitors offer, and new clients they boast. As a result, they head into pitches more informed and can find the best ways to differentiate their offerings.

Using Sprout’s Competitive Listening topic can inform your content strategy through competitor content. One company in the gaming industry uses Listening to monitor top competitor content and digital chatter. Doing this inspires fresh content that resonates with relevant audiences and empowers them to keep an eye on competitor performance compared to theirs.

Apply it: Use social listening to get a high-level grasp on your competitors’ engagement metrics and your share of voice next to theirs. Then, zoom into their social content to help inform your own.

And pro tip: Don’t sleep on the Sprout Listening Themes feature–it will help you during competitor analysis and beyond. They’re like a Listening topic nested within your larger topic to help you organize your query by specific categories. You can even compare themes against each other.

This is helpful if you’re asked for specific product feedback or event reactions. For example, let’s say you’re a coffee company and you’re using the Brand Health Listening template in Sprout. You notice a lot of your incoming messages focus on drink types, and you want to see how your audience talks about, say, your seasonal drinks vs. your mainstays.

You don’t have to create a whole new listening topic—you just need to add Topic Themes to compare these message types. Go to your Listening Query, scroll down, select Add Themes (Optional) and build your theme much like you built your initial Listening query.

This can also help you understand the conversation around a theme across your brand and competitors. Here’s how Themes might look for a University comparing notes in a Competitor Analysis template.

Finally, listening also enables you to find engagement spikes on competitor channels. With the Competitor Engagements graph, click into specific engagement spikes to see what drove the conversation. What did they post about? Is it a trend you should join in on? A new offering, product or announcement you should be aware of?

Perform market research to inform teams beyond marketing

Sharing insights from your social media data collection beyond the marketing team is becoming a more common, and needed, practice. Today, 76% of marketers agree their team’s social insights inform other departments, according to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™.

From competitive intelligence to product learnings, social listening insights are often bigger than social. And the brands using social insights to enrich business decisions beyond the social team are working and growing smarter.

For example, one agency in the building and manufacturing industry uses listening to keep their product team one step ahead. They set up five different listening topics about new products they had plans to eventually develop and offer. Keeping tabs on these product types in the conversation helped them uncover gaps in the industry, learn how people feel about the different product types and see what their competition looked like.

This product knowledge isn’t always the most impactful for social or content. But it’s invaluable for product planning and the decision-making that goes into it.

Apply it: Using some of the tactical listening tips we’ve discussed, mirror this brand. Set up Listening topics in Sprout around specific products. Analyzing the conversation and sentiment around these products enables you to understand how people feel about them, gaps you can fill, pain points and what makes competitor products stand out.

Use these social media listening examples to unearth social insight gold

With these social media listening examples in the back of your mind, what gems will you discover that can change your strategy and entire business?

If you’re already a Sprout customer, don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you need more help. And if you don’t have Sprout’s Listening solution yet, reach out to us for a free demo to explore social listening for yourself.

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The post Social media listening examples that will help you unearth better insights appeared first on Sprout Social.

This article will unpack how social media insights are essential to understanding younger consumers and how brands are using that data to transform and reach new audiences.

What younger consumers want from brands

Depending on your company and industry, appealing to younger consumers doesn’t always mean marketing to Gen Z or Gen Alpha. Even legacy brands that once catered to older generations have to pivot and address the younger generations who will eventually age into their target audience. For example, a life insurance brand may want to appeal to both older and younger generations.

Every generation has a different relationship with social, but regardless of age, there are some common factors all ages are looking for from brands: responsiveness, authenticity and entertaining content.

Responsive customer engagement and care

The latest Sprout Social Index™ found consumers across all ages have similar outlooks on what brands can do to leave a lasting impression. More than half of consumers (51%) say responding to customers makes brands the most memorable on social media. Younger audiences, especially Gen Z, are not afraid to call out customer care issues on social media, so responsiveness is critical—whether the feedback is positive or negative.

Brand authenticity

It’s easy for brands to default to hopping on timely trends and challenges or creating a social-specific brand voice because it aligns with the zeitgeist. But at the end of the day, everyone is seeking brand authenticity. They want businesses to be true genuine and true to themselves.

Younger generations like Gen Z and Millennials seek transparency about business practices and values, along with social content that isn’t overly salesy. Authentic, non promotional posts were ranked as the top content type consumers don’t see enough of from brands on social, according to the Index.

Engaging, entertaining posts

The Index shows 68% of consumers follow brands to stay informed about new products or services, but nearly half (45%) follow brands on social because they post enjoyable, entertaining content. However, promotional and entertaining content don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Compelling content—whether it’s from external creators or your in-house social team—attracts new audiences. Balancing engaging content with posts that showcase your products or services in action guides consumers further along the buyer’s journey.

How to use social to reposition your brand for younger audiences

Social media data empowers businesses to identify how to reposition their brand to engage younger consumers. By monitoring social, brands can unlock insights to support the business and take the right course of action to connect with their target demographic.

Listen to what your target generation cares about

The 2023 State of Social Media report shows 91% of leaders say social data will have a positive impact on organizations’ ability to get a better understanding of customers. Through social media listening, you can get a better understanding of what your target generation(s) are talking about online and the trends that matter to them.

Understand your new competitors

The 2023 State of Social Media report also shows 92% of leaders say social data will have a positive impact on improving competitive positioning. Use competitive intelligence from your social channels to learn how indirect competitors currently target the consumers you’re trying to reach. Consider how to reverse engineer their content strategy or take advantage of gaps present within your industry or niche.

Identify relevant partners

Collaborating with content creators and influencers who have a trusting relationship with the people you’re trying to reach can have a halo effect for your brand. Leverage their expertise to create influencer marketing campaigns that will resonate with target audiences.

9 brands successfully adapting their strategies to reach younger consumers

Let’s delve into nine examples of brands that are adapting their strategies to connect with younger and older consumers alike:

1. Bobby Jack

Bobby Jack is taking advantage of their popularity during the early 2000s to connect with younger Millennials and Gen Z. The apparel brand offers a vintage Y2K collection and an affiliate program. They have a strong user-generated content strategy, encouraging their customers to tag them on social media. Their brand voice maintains the sassiness and humor Bobby Jack is known for, but still feels modern and doesn’t try too hard.

You can see popular colloquial terms and phrases like, “Bobby Jack, for baddies only,” across their website and social channels. They use social media to join in on relevant conversations, trending sounds and topics for both younger and older audiences.

For example, this TikTok below pokes fun at Bored Ape Yacht Club, an NFT-collection that features eclectic apes:

The caption, “We hate nfts. Bobby Jack forever,” achieves the brand’s sarcastic tone while referencing a niche topic relevant to both Gen Z and the OG Millennials who remember “the little bad monkey” who hated so many things in their youth. The brand taps into 2000s nostalgia frequently, like in the TikTok below that features one of their most iconic looks: a Bobby Jack tee, brown gauchos and a tiny backpack.

2. American Association of Retired Persons (AARP)

The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) isn’t just focusing on consumers in their golden years. The nonprofit engages with 20-50+ year olds.

AARP’s TikTok account has a dedicated Gen X following. Along with collaborating with Gen X creators, the nonprofit’s posts are peppered with ‘80s and ‘90s cultural references and relatable content. For example, the viral video below shows what happens when you’re over 40 and the party goes past 10 pm:

Community management is also a large part of their strategy. You can find AARP  frequently connecting with people in the TikTok comments section.

3. Abercrombie & Fitch

Over the past several years, Abercrombie & Fitch has been working to reposition its brand to appeal to Millennials and Gen Z by revamping everything from their brick and mortar stores to their social strategy. The brand also offers more sizing options and wider model representation.

The clothing brand partners with IF7, a Gen Z consultancy, on their TikTok strategy. A case study revealed the brand transformation was powered by aspect-based insights from TikTok videos and comments. Along with using younger imagery, the turnaround campaign was centered around creators and influencers, offering promos and discount codes.

The campaign was a massive success, earning over 245 million views for the #Abercrombie hashtag and 45 million for #AbercrombieHaul. Many creator videos have earned thousands of views, such as the one below that encourages people to shop Fitch’s updated wardrobe:

4. Dyson

Founded in 1991, the British household appliance brand Dyson was best known for revolutionizing vacuum cleaners and hand dryers. The brand took the beauty world by storm after launching its first handheld hair dryer in 2016, the Dyson Supersonic, which received rave reviews across social. The Supersonic was followed by the Dyson Airwrap, which sold out almost immediately—over 130,000 people joined the waitlist for the device.

Today, Dyson is still known for their viral hair dryer and straightener product lines. The brand leans into a community-first strategy, with TikTok accounts dedicated to several regions including Germany, Singapore, Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates. Across their TikTok accounts, they share user-generated content that features product tutorials and reviews.

Although beauty content is a popular favorite, Dyson also features awareness stage content for their other non-beauty products.

5. The Home Depot

The Home Depot is often considered a Baby Boomer or Gen X homeowner favorite, but the home improvement retailer has adapted its social strategy to target Millennials and Gen Z as these generations gain more buying power. They also take advantage of nurturing niche communities online like gardeners and DIY aficionados.

The Home Depot leans heavily into influencer marketing, partnering with creators like @kourtnileigh (Kourtni Muñoz) to create bespoke DIY content. She created several videos sharing tips for preparing for hurricane season:

The Home Depot’s TikTok, X (formerly known as Twitter) and Instagram also feature engaging content that appeals to younger consumers and touches on relevant trends like this Barbie-inspired video that preps viewers for spooky season:

6. Dollar Tree

Similar to The Home Depot, Dollar Tree leans into the craft and DIY space to successfully connect with younger consumers. On their TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X pages you’ll find branded craft tutorials, affordable shopping tips, user-generated content and creator posts. And of course, they’re active on the DIYer’s paradise, Pinterest.

Dollar Tree has strong community engagement: on Facebook, they have 2.8 million followers who they frequently interact with—whether it’s sharing craft ideas, highlighting name brand products or answering customer care questions.

The brand is also quick to interact in their TikTok comments section.

7. Dell

Dell serves as a standout example of a brand successfully collaborating with the right influencers. They partnered with creator @CorporateNatalie, who is known for her comedic corporate career content. Many of these videos touch on common generational experiences in the workplace, such as a Millennial manager explaining to a Gen Z team member how certain slang terms might be interpreted incorrectly by executives or clients. In the video below, she plays off the need to stay connected, even while on PTO:

To target younger consumers, Dell partnered with creators for back-to-school content on their Instagram. @EmmaRupard created several #StudyWithMe lo-fi videos to help promote the new XPS 13 Plus. With remote learning and work as the new norm, desk setup videos are very popular among Gen Z students.

8. Claire’s

Although many associate Claire’s with angsty teen trips to the mall, the legacy accessories brand has been on a journey to reposition their brand to target Gen Z and Alpha through their content strategy.

Along with a metaverse activation on Roblox, Claire’s runs a College Creators program to work with Gen Z to create TikTok videos. These video collaborations have been a catalyst for brand reach. For example, the TikTok video below features Claire’s intern Mary Clare Lacke, which earned over 1.3 million views:

They’re also connecting with younger consumers through their #DearClaire docuseries that centers the voices of young girls and shines perspectives into issues like self-love and mental health.

9. Polaroid

In a world filled by augmented reality filters, artificial intelligence (AI) imagery and hypercurated Instagram posts, Polaroid is betting on its analog roots by embracing imperfection and authenticity in its social content.

The camera and film brand is working with 15 rising and established photography influencers including Andre D. Wagner and Thalía Gochez to highlight the creative opportunities analog and digital products create. With this strategy, Polaroid exposes younger generations to the less predictable, yet beautiful nature of analog photography, but the brand also leverages nostalgia for older generations who may have memories of snapping their own photos years ago.

Position your brand to transcend generations with social data

Age is a just number, but life is a culmination of moments that define our personality, values and interests.  Marketers can bridge generational gaps and amplify their brands by harnessing the power of social data. To learn more insights about what consumers want and how to position your brand for the future, download The Sprout Social Index™.

The post How to reach younger consumers: 9 legacy brands adapting for new audiences appeared first on Sprout Social.

Within these tools, conversational analytics harnesses the power of customer conversations and discussions by identifying and tracking hidden brand insights. This market-driven, real-time intelligence empowers marketing teams to amplify brand reach in a targeted manner, spot emerging trends and gain competitive insights. Thus, enabling you to create a better customer experience that translates into repeat business and profitable revenue streams.

Continue reading to see how conversational analytics impacts your business by leaning into social data for rich insights and empowering business leaders to make strategic decisions.

What is conversational analytics?

Conversational analytics is actionable intelligence in the form of trends and reports derived from analyzing customer conversations using AI and machine learning.

Sophisticated social listening tools, powered by ML and AI technologies like sentiment analysis and NLP, scan millions of data points in customer chatter to understand consumers’ needs, wants and brand experience. This provides crucial insight into your brand health, market trends and competitor performance, enabling you to grow your business strategically with data-driven insights.

Important sources for conversational analytics include social media listening, virtual agent and chatbot interactions, customer care emails, review forums, sales calls and other feedback channels.

What are the benefits of conversational analytics?

Social listening tools powered by conversational analytics discover relevant information from thousands of customer comments and conversations within seconds. Thus, enabling your teams to concentrate on strategy and business impact rather than manual data analysis.

Here is a closer look at the key benefits.

Enhance customer experience

According to research, brands focused on building positive customer experiences are 60% more profitable compared to those that aren’t.

Keeping a tab on social customer care conversations helps you uncover common themes and topics, revealing service or product issues that would otherwise go unnoticed. This helps you elevate your customer experience strategy to build loyalty and attract new customers. Plus, it supports cross-functional teams by providing customer-centric insights to propel their efforts forward and improve the overall brand experience.

Discover brand insights

Brand insights from conversational analytics enable you to grow your social presence and improve brand perception. They aid you in making key business decisions like choosing the right social media influencers for your brand or building successful co-branding partnerships like Spotify and Starbucks, where Starbucks customers can sign-up for a free Spotify premium subscription.

Gain competitive intelligence

According to The Sprout Social Index™ 2022, 90% of marketers agree social insights help differentiate their brands in the market for a competitive edge. With conversational analytics, glean countless customer discussions and conversations around competitors and your brand on networks like Reddit, Google My Business (GMB), Glassdoor, Facebook and Instagram to derive competitive intelligence.

AI tasks like entity chunking and machine learning effortlessly detect competitor brand names in customer comments on your social channels or on review platforms to give you a contextual understanding of those conversations. When combined with other areas like social engagement, these insights help you map out competitive benchmarks and track what your competitors are doing to inform your strategy.

Improve sales conversions

Conversational analytics tools help you gauge what aspects can jumpstart your sales conversions based on customer preferences and the latest developments in the market.

For example, automated filtering and categorization of topics in social listening data surface opportunities in real-time to enhance the customer journey and influence purchase decisions. This enables you to develop successful short-term strategies like relevant discounts and incentives to take advantage of what’s trending.

Track and manage brand health

Measure and manage your brand reputation by regularly monitoring and engaging with customer conversations on social and review sites. This is important because a timely response to feedback, negative or positive, is important to customers, as our 2022 Index revealed.

Social listening tools assist you in tracking brand sentiment, especially from networks that best capture your audiences like Yelp and Trustpilot for hospitality or GMB for local businesses. Plus, set alerts for spikes in brand mentions and use the insights to guide your online review management strategy.

With Sprout, you can also merge your review management system with CRMs like Zendesk, HubSpot, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 to get a holistic view of customer feedback.

Build your employer brand

Conversational analytics through social listening on networks like Glassdoor gives you a comprehensive view of your employee experience and how they perceive your company culture. This is an important aspect of employee development because happy employees are essential for a profitable business.

They are also your best evangelizers and key to building your employer brand. Employee advocacy helps you grow your business by reaching a much larger new audience compared to traditional social media tactics. For example, Simpli.fi reached one million unique users just with their sales teams using employee advocacy.

Product innovation

Conversational analytics enables you to keep a pulse on rising industry trends by identifying common topics in customer conversations. These could be direct messages on your social channels or chatbots, or discussions on customer forums.

Insights from market indicators can predict customer needs, changing preferences and purchase motivators. This helps drive product innovation for an evergreen growth strategy that keeps evolving.

Create engaging content

Conversational analytics give you precise indicators into what content resonates with your audience. This is critical given that customer preferences can be vastly diverse as seen in our latest Index where 34% of customers preferred low-fi content from brands they follow, 51% preferred product-driven content and 39% loved real customer demos.

Track content performance and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) to check on audience growth, hashtag usage, post/content type, volume and frequency to improve brand amplification and social engagement.

How does conversational analytics software work?

Conversational analytics is a key component of AI marketing because it allows you to dig into tons of customer feedback data for insights that truly matter to your business. Here is a look at how the technique works under the hood.

Identify objectives

The first step to getting relevant insights from social listening is zeroing in on your objectives. For example, ask yourself: Are you using data analysis to meet long-term goals like enhancing customer experience or short-term goals like click-through rates (CTRs) to encourage a trial or purchase? Having this perspective helps you narrow your focus into high-priority areas and results that will best support your goals.

Gather relevant data

The more relevant the data source, the more accurate your insights. For example, choose industry-specific channels like TripAdvisor if you’re in the hospitality industry, or Yelp and GMB if you’re a local business.

These sources, along with customer interactions with virtual agents and chatbots on your websites, social media DMs and consumer forums like Reddit, will give you the critical brand insights you need.

Process the data

Filtering noise from tons of customer conversations and social chatter to get the right insights is the next step. Conversational analytics tools use AI tasks like NLP and named entity recognition (NER) to identify important topics and themes that emerge from data analysis. NLP and NER are also essential for sentiment analysis, so you can dig into conversational data to measure customer experience and brand health.

In Sprout, our Query Builder helps you sieve through millions of audience conversations to capture the full extent of the social listening data based on keywords and hashtags you choose. Plus, it can filter out spam to provide only those messages most relevant to your preferences.

Watch this video from one of our research experts to learn more.

Our AI-powered Queries by AI Assist further shapes your listening data by giving you additional keyword recommendations (words and phrases) to cut through congested feeds and create robust queries for more precise topic results.

The actionable insights derived from this processing enable you to build a multi-layer strategy to enhance customer service and maintain positive brand sentiment to grow market share holistically.

Visualize insights

User-friendly, presentation-ready reports are as important as the accuracy of the insights you receive, especially when you’re collaborating with internal stakeholders. These reports help you contextualize the data so you’re able to make decisions on the best next moves for your brand strategy.

For example, in Sprout, get in-depth, presentation-ready reports on hashtag trends, paid and organic breakdowns and conversion ratios that demonstrate the impact of your findings to decision-makers.

Plus, choose insight visualizations as word clouds to get trending topics at a glance.

Harnessing the power of social with conversational analytics

Powerful social media listening tools unlock the potential of your customer experience data seamlessly so you have the insights you are looking for at your fingertips.

Indiana University tapped into this opportunity, using conversational analytics to gather insights from audience feedback and comments across their social channels. They wanted to understand how former and current students, and families felt about their brand and if there were any specific concerns that needed to be prioritized and addressed.

Using Sprout’s listening and analytics capabilities, they proactively identified and tracked issues as they arose. This enabled them to provide actionable insights to the institution’s leadership team and develop an effective social response strategy to manage brand health.

They were also able to have a unified brand strategy across departments to enhance community engagement and solidify relationships with partners.

Elevate your brand strategy with conversational analytics

AI tasks like conversational analytics enable you to mine social insights that give you a deeper understanding of your customers. These insights empower you to capitalize on innovative ways to market your brand and elevate growth.

Draw inspiration from this webinar to find tactical ways to use AI and automation to spot rising trends and become further strategy-driven. Also discover more real-life examples of brands already leveraging AI to shape their social strategy.

The post Conversational analytics: How to use social listening for brand insights appeared first on Sprout Social.

Coupled with the unpredictable nature of social media and the looming economic downturn, many weary financial services executives see social media as a threat. Add viral “meme stocks”—stocks that can become overvalued due to positive online sentiment—to the mix, and it became clear social media has real world implications and the potential to derail financial companies.

But refraining from social media altogether only creates more room for crises to snowball and brand health to plummet. More than ever, financial services brands must take steps to use social media as an essential part of their risk mitigation and brand safety strategy, instead of downplaying its impact or fearing it.

Stop a crisis in its tracks with social listening

Customer sentiment can change overnight. By employing brand safety tools like social listening, teams can jump into action at the first sign of trouble. Listening enables financial institutions to perform swift situation analysis and crisis management, which are crucial for successful crisis responses.

In a recent webinar, Sprout Social CFO Joe Del Preto explains how listening can help brands facing a crisis: “Identify the crisis before you have a bigger problem on you hands, and respond appropriately, ensuring your team is empowered with the correct information. It comes down to proactively managing reputational risks with consumers, employees and the market on social.”

Ryan Phillips, a Sprout Solutions Engineer with experience managing social in the finance industry, echoes the benefits of listening. “Risk mitigation goes beyond monitoring comments and engagements on the corporate page. It should encompass conversations across the internet. That’s why social listening is the most valuable way to mitigate risk. It stops ripples about your brand online from becoming a tidal wave.”

To see social listening at work, read Sprout Social’s analysis of GameStop, the meme stock at the center of an internet-prompted short squeeze. Our data illustrated how mentions of GameStop (GME) increased 2,805% in one week in early 2021, and perfectly correlated with the price fluctuations of the brand’s stock. Had hedge funds caught onto the buzz surrounding GME stock sooner, their financial consequences might not have been so severe.

Using a listening solution like Sprout Social enables you to automatically sift through billions of data points in seconds, detecting market trends before they go viral (or have material implications). These AI-powered tools capture pivotal data like the sentiment, volume, unique authors and growth over time of topics related to your brand.

Use social to uncover real-time voice of customer data

The benefits of social go far beyond monitoring volume and stopping an existing crisis from growing. Social listening offers valuable voice of customer (VoC) data that keeps you up to speed on the health of your business, the industry overall and fluctuations in consumer preferences.

Take Del Preto’s social listening ritual. “My head of investor relations has social listening queries running at all times that are tracking what our competitors are doing. Did they launch a new product? How does our sentiment compare to theirs? We make sure we stay ahead of anything that could bubble up to cause major problems, or present new opportunities,” he says.

For financial service brands, social listening queries can surface everything from stock market trends to negative discourse surrounding their company or products. Del Preto explains, “I know dozens of financial services firms using listening…They use it for risk mitigation, competitive analysis, trend spotting and staying up to date on industry news.”

Phillips explains why all of this data exists on social: “When someone is looking for a [financial solution], they go on social media and see what their friends recommend. Then, they look up your profile to get a first impression of your brand…Social is where your community is talking about solutions to their financial problems.”

This is especially true for Gen Z consumers. According to Accenture, 82% of consumers aged 18-24 acquired a financial services product from a new provider in the past 12 months, proving that younger demographics are a growing market whose loyalty is up for grabs. Social is critical for reaching this audience and discovering more about their needs, especially for traditional and legacy brands fighting for market share against digital-only challenger banks.

Listening enables you to tap into consumer conversations, and deliver insights and key learnings you need to guide your organization-wide strategy. The tools reveal how consumers feel about your competitors, and help you identify industry gaps to find new opportunities to differentiate your business.

Provide a best-in-class customer experience—on social and beyond

Social is a prime place to boost your discoverability, drive brand awareness and loyalty, and help your company deliver business development results—while ensuring higher customer satisfaction. Brands achieve this by creating meaningful connections with customers and advocates, and providing real-time customer care. But Phillips warns this can create reputation risks if you don’t have a strong customer care strategy in place, or if you have an inconsistent posting cadence.

Data supports his claim. According to The 2022 Sprout Social Index™, when consumers wait too long for a brand to respond on social, 36% say they will share that negative experience with friends and family. A comparable 31% won’t complete their purchase, while 30% will buy from a competitor instead.

Your audience wants to see that you care about helping your customers, and have a POV on the pain points, topics and trends that matter most to them. For example, see how expense management solution company Brex creates content that speaks to the needs of their target audience.

And attentively responds to incoming customer queries on social.

With a social media management tool, you can empower your team to create consistent and compliant brand experiences that level-up to your organization’s goals. A tool like Sprout enables you to elevate customer care experiences, find authentic ways to engage your audience, streamline your posting strategy and make more strategic decisions with analytics solutions.

Keep your friends close and social insights closer

Especially in highly regulated industries, it’s easy to see social as a threat rather than an opportunity. But the right social media management partners can help your company see around the corner of a crisis and future-proof your strategy long-term. Rather than get caught up in a downward spiral, build consumer confidence and boost brand awareness on social.

Looking for more insight into how you can build a compelling social presence? Checkout these social media tips for banks and financial institutions to help you maximize performance and minimize risk.

The post For financial services brands, social media is a risk mitigation friend—not foe appeared first on Sprout Social.

Business leaders agree that social media data and insights are essential for trendspotting, competitor analysis, proactive crisis management and more. Boosting outcomes in these key areas means integrating social into every corner of an organization.

Social media data collection tools have made connecting the dots between efforts and outcomes easier. Businesses looking to reap even more value from social must champion findings with collaborators beyond marketing. When companies adopt a social-first consumer perspective, teams can drive relevance and business impact.

You understand the why, so it’s time to get into the how. These five stories will inspire you to approach social data analysis in new ways, elevating the efforts of your entire team.

Why is social data important?

According to The 2023 State of Social Media Report, the key business priorities in today’s economic environment are: building brand reputation and loyalty, gaining a deeper understanding of customers, improving competitive positioning, moving forward with reduced budgets and predicting future trends.

Social data can enhance all of these outcomes, helping brands stay ahead in increasingly competitive conditions. It’s about more than just your performance data. When you dive into the industry, competitive and cultural insights social can provide, you unlock the tools needed to stand out in a crowded market.

This value isn’t limited to your marketing organization, either. From product development to customer support, social data analysis can answer a brand’s most important questions about how to manage and expand a business across every department.

Use social data to zero in on what’s building brand reputation and loyalty

Social data allows businesses to build deeper connections with their audience, elevating products and services from “wants” to “needs”. It’s no surprise that business leaders near-unanimously (94%) agree that social data and insights have a positive impact on building brand reputation and loyalty.

The combined power of performance data and social-first brand health insights gives businesses an enhanced perspective on what’s moving the needle with their audience. Even marketers navigating complex and highly-regulated industries can rely on social data to help humanize a brand and shape its reputation.

Take Plaid, for example. The San Francisco-based fintech company makes it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to their favorite apps and services safely and securely. The brand’s success hinged on a ton of stakeholder education—for both consumers and financial institutions who were unfamiliar with the technology.

Matthew McConnell, Plaid’s Social Media Lead, says the channel plays a key role in managing brand perception. “We want to empower our followers with useful content, so they can help spread the word about Plaid.”

With help from Sprout Social, Plaid has created a data-driven feedback loop that supports sharper messaging, raising both brand awareness and reputation. “Tagging in Sprout helps us know which content we’re sharing that’s performing best,” says McConnell. “And if something isn’t working well, we can dig in to understand why, and recalibrate our strategy to make sure we’re providing our diverse audiences with access to the information they want, in the way they want to consume it.”

Use social data to understand your customers

If your social data analysis is limited to your brand’s performance metrics, you’re not tapping the full value of social. With social listening, brands can zoom out and listen to the larger social conversations happening around their industry, competitors and most importantly, their audience.

Goally—a technology company on a mission to ease the lives of families with neurodiverse individuals—uses Sprout’s Social Listening tools to stay in lockstep with the families they support. Through industry and brand health analysis, Kaelyn Brooks, Digital Marketing Specialist at Goally, surfaced a common need of parents raising neurodiverse children: They want to see their children become independent.

“That learning has really validated our vision as a company,” says Brooks. “We know the problem we’re chasing is real, and we’re providing a solution—a really good one, too. Education is often lacking in the world of neurodiversity, and people don’t know where to get information. Social media channels like TikTok offer a unique and accessible way for people to ask authentic questions and get answers.”

These learnings are rooted in the needs and preferences of existing and potential customers, serving as a north star for Goally’s messaging.

Analyze social data to improve competitive positioning

Casey’s is looking to increase its slice of the pizza market—and their team is relying on social to fuel their game plan.

The midwest-staple is a go-to spot for gas, groceries, gifts and for those in the know, pizza. Casey’s handmade pizza has so many diehard fans, the convenience store is actually the fifth-largest pizza chain in the nation.

Jasmine Riedemann, Social Media Manager at Casey’s, uses Sprout’s Tagging and Social Listening features to inform localized campaigns for customers–designed to cement their status as pizza pros. The team then leverages this social data analysis to refine their creative approach.

“During our biweekly check-in with our creative and social teams, we look at the Post Performance Report more in-depth and also examine real-time trends to decide whether we should shift gears with our content plan to take advantage of those trends,” says Riedemann.

Even if your brand isn’t operating in a space that is as universally well-loved as pizza, you can still use social data to uncover vital competitive insights. Just like the team at Flock Freight.

“We did an analysis of all the other players (peers and competitors) in the logistics and supply chain space,” says Bob Wolfley, Director of Social Media and Partnerships at Flock Freight. “Some trucking companies recognize drivers in certain ways, but they don’t do deep storytelling. Those insights showed us we had an opportunity to tell these stories in a fun, yet meaningful way. There’s a mix of tones, which we love because there are opportunities for truck drivers to relate when they find and consume this content.”

Rely on predictive data to inform customer service needs

Seasonality in customer service can create major staffing challenges. Do you staff up and stomach the unnecessary labor costs? Or keep a lean ship and risk falling short on customer expectations?

Hudl—a software company offering performance analysis tools for sports teams and athletes—knows this problem well. Luckily, with help from Sprout Social, their team is able to accurately forecast customer engagements so they can staff smarter.

“One of the most helpful metrics we get from Sprout is volume—especially, our seasonal volume,” says Jessie Koenig, Revenue Systems Administrator at Hudl. “We don’t train every rep to handle social media work. And in the past, it was very difficult for us to forecast our staffing. The reports we generate from Sprout allow us to gauge when we need to ramp up social support, and when it’s best to guide customers to self-service support and tutorials.”

Thanks to social data, the Hudl team is able to provide game-changing customer care year-round. These efforts help increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, while managing costs efficiently.

Predict future trends with data from social listening

Social provides a view of the culture at large, allowing brands to spot trends before they reach their peak.

In an interview with Glossy, L’Oréal Chief Digital and Marketing Officer revealed the brand uses social listening to stay on top of an increasingly short trend cycle. “If everyone is talking about this Y2K aesthetic right now and we show up one year later, we’ve completely missed this train,” says Wen. “So in order for us to do that, it has to first start from a position where we’re listening and two, have that capability in-house for us to activate very, very quickly.”

Social’s impact on the beauty industry is well-known and documented, but it’s not a rare phenomenon. Brands across industries are harnessing the power of social data analysis to stay ahead of trends.

When Lodge Cast Iron kicked off routine social listening efforts, they quickly discovered a new market segment emerging: vegans. It turns out the brand had a growing fan-base within the vegan community, yet the majority of their content was geared toward meat-eaters.

Social media market research allowed the Lodge Cast Iron team to take a bold approach with a brand-new audience. They began sharing meatless recipe ideas to widen their audience engagement strategy, opening their brand up to new fans.

Let your social data lead the way

In a perfect world, each marketer would have a crystal ball that shows them how to meet their customers efficiently and effectively. Unfortunately, we’ve yet to discover the marketing magic needed to pull that off. Until then, we can give you the next best thing: Sprout Social’s suite of social media analytics and listening tools.

With Sprout, you can join these forward-thinking companies and start making better business decisions faster. Sign up for trial today, and see how Sprout Social can help you unlock the true potential of your social media strategy.

Sign Up for a Free 30-day Sprout Trial

The post 5 stories that showcase social data’s rising influence on business success appeared first on Sprout Social.

Every six months may have been enough in the past, but now, consumer preferences can change instantly. Commissioning a five-figure biannual brand reputation survey—and spending multiple months on data collection and analysis—means the research you conduct will always be stale.

You deserve real-time insights, unfiltered audience opinions and speedy results. It may seem like asking for too much but trust me, you’re worth it. Plus, social insights can give you everything you got from your brand survey and more.

If you’re wondering whether it’s the right time to say goodbye, keep reading. We’re making the case for moving on to bigger and better things.

What is a brand survey?

Brand surveys measure how an audience thinks and feels about a brand. These surveys are designed to gauge overall brand health and perception with specific audiences. For example, if you seek insights on how your brand stacks up against its competitors, you’d probably survey prospects and customers. Alternatively, if you’re trying to understand how your brand resonates as an employer, surveying your colleagues would provide stronger insights.

Survey questions can vary based on your goals. Here are four types of brand survey questions marketers use to learn more about how audiences perceive their brand:

• Cognitive: Questions that assess what audiences associate with your brand. For example, people might associate Apple with “minimalism” or “innovation.”
• Emotional: Questions that measure the emotional connection a respondent has with your brand.
• Descriptive: Questions that prompt respondents to describe your brand in their own words. These questions are typically open-ended.
• Action-based: Questions that ask respondents to rate the quality of their experiences with your brand.

These questions can be used in different combinations to better understand how people view your brand and how that differs from your company’s perception of itself.

Evaluating brand health—why traditional survey methods are not enough

A healthy brand is like having an emergency line of credit for times of crisis. The stronger your brand health is, the more forgiving your audience is likely to be in the event of an issue.

Routine brand health evaluations help you better understand how an unforeseen event might impact your brand’s reputation. This information enables you to determine the perceived threat of a crisis, making it foundational to your response strategy.

If you’re only conducting biannual brand perception surveys, you could be missing meaningful shifts in audience sentiment. If that’s not enough, here are three reasons you should reconsider your brand survey distribution plans.

• Your brand health is constantly changing: Biannual surveys used to make sense because up until recently, there were only a few ways to move the needle on brand perception. Now, social media and review sites have empowered consumers to speak their minds whenever the inspiration strikes. If you’re not consistently monitoring your online brand health, you’re likely missing vital feedback.
• Your survey design could lead to biased responses: You don’t know what you don’t know. Even now, an online conversation could impact how people will perceive your brand for months to come. Even the most intentional question list can return biased results if it’s not informed by accurate insights.
• You need timely insights: Brand health survey design and distribution takes a long time. If you need to understand how a current event is affecting your brand perception, you don’t have any time to waste.
• NPS and star ratings don’t provide the whole picture: Net promoter scores (NPS) and star rating systems aren’t the most dependable brand survey methods. They give you no contextual insights and are notoriously difficult to trust given that most users provide ratings arbitrarily. For example, ratings may depend on the mood of the customer or have nothing to do with the product but rather their interactions with staff. Unless there is a comment accompanying the rating, you have no way of getting actionable insights to improve your brand health.
• Ratings discount customer segmentation: Customer demographics play a key role in market research as brand experience may differ vastly based on segmentations such as age groups or ethnic backgrounds. For example, a resort may get different ratings from families with little children than from older guests based on the holiday, in-house entertainment facilities or proximity to transportation. That’s why blanket biannual brand surveys for customer ratings can give you skewed data.

Brand survey functionality across social networks

Brand surveys on social are typically used to gauge ad effectiveness. That said, they can also provide valuable insights into brand perception and awareness. If your team often relies on paid social, use any of the following in-network survey tools to get more out of your budget.

Twitter Brand Surveys

On Twitter, brands aren’t just part of the fun. Sometimes, they’re driving the fun themselves. Seven out of 10 Twitter users even say that “Brand Twitter” is one of the best parts of being present on the network.

Using Twitter Brand Surveys can help you better understand what drives brand lift among an already receptive audience. These surveys are typically used to measure awareness after repeat ad exposure. They can also be used to dig into message association for your brand and its competitors.

LinkedIn Brand Lift Tests

LinkedIn Brand Lift Surveys help marketers measure several brand awareness metrics as they run ads on the platform. The surveys use test and control groups to determine the overall effectiveness of an ad, alongside key perception metrics like brand favorability, familiarity and product consideration.

While these brand surveys are technically free, there are some strings attached. Marketers must spend a minimum ad budget of $90,000 in a given period to use the Brand Lift Survey feature.

Facebook Brand Survey Tests

With Facebook, you can use the Experiments tool to run a brand survey test. Like LinkedIn, these surveys reach a test and control group to calculate the impact a Facebook ad has on brand awareness and perception. These tools are particularly useful if you’re wondering how well an awareness campaign is resonating with a target audience.

There are minimum ad spend requirements to use Facebook’s brand survey tools, but they vary by country.

How to conduct rolling, real-time brand surveys with Sprout Social

In-network survey tools best measure brand awareness after repeat ad exposure. But that only scratches the surface of brand insights available on social media. According to The 2023 State of Social Media report, 95% of business leaders agree social media data and insights are important to inform business decisions outside of marketing.

Sixty-nine percent are already investing in social media tools, with 62% using listening features to capture all the conversations about your brand on social and review sites. This is crucial for meeting KPIs and keeping track of competitors as social listening helps synthesize discussions across social networks into actionable business insights. Here are three Sprout tools that will help you get it done.

1. Brand Health Social Listening Topics

Sprout’s Listening tool helps brands keep a pulse on the conversations that matter most. Think of it as a real-time focus group that provides honest, unfiltered feedback.

You can use five Listening Topic templates to tap into social insights at scale. For this case, let’s check out the Brand Health Topic Template.

The Brand Health Topic template will help you gauge the public perception of your brand or products. By using the right social listening platform you can decide what counts as a mention using the Query Builder, so you can factor in your brand name, popular product names, common misspellings and more. Whatever it takes to get a comprehensive picture of what people are saying about your brand online so you make improvements as needed such as better customer support or better-targeted content.

This ongoing analysis has several advantages to a traditional brand survey. Most notably, ongoing sentiment tracking.

Sprout’s social media sentiment analysis tool monitors the positive, negative and neutral mentions of your brand within a particular time period. It also provides vital details on how sentiment is trending over time.

2. Competitive Analysis Social Listening Topics

Brand health survey questions typically don’t assess your brand performance in a vacuum. Your competitors are an essential piece of the puzzle. In Sprout, you can track their public perception and compare it to yours using the Competitive Analysis Listening Topic Template.

This report will help you visualize your brand’s share of voice compared to competitors’. These insights are a critical tool in assessing what differentiates your brand from the competition, whether they’re indirect, direct or aspirational.

To get started, decide on a few priority competitors. Once you’ve created your shortlist, you can add their brand names and related keywords to the Listening Query Builder. Related keywords might include product names, branded hashtags or direct profile mentions. Finally, add in your brand information. The Listening Topic will backfill data for the past 30 days and continue to collect it over time for consistent, rolling insights.

3. Inbound Message Tagging and Tag Reports

Thirty-one percent of consumers prefer to leave feedback about products or services via social media, making it the most popular channel to do so. These messages are rich sources of brand health information and influence business decisions outside of marketing such as improving product features and customer care.

Sprout’s Tagging feature can help identify and organize incoming messages from across all social networks. You can then report on those Tags using the Tag Performance Report. This information can help you translate large volumes of customer feedback into actionable insights that illuminate your audience’s thoughts and feelings.

Creating this system requires ongoing collaboration with whichever team typically manages social support requests. This process may not seem natural at first, but it’s critical to breaking down information silos and accelerating time to insights.

The team at Grammarly, a cloud-based typing assistant, pulls this off by sharing quarterly reports on themes found within their social messages to keep others up to date on trends and opportunities they’re seeing in customer support.

Brand surveys: It’s not you, it’s them

Breaking up is hard to do. Still, when your current brand survey practices are standing in the way of faster, more accurate insights, you’ve got to rip off the bandage and say goodbye.

If you still find yourself wondering if you’re ready for what’s next, check out this social media market research worksheet. This tool will give you a framework for extracting unbiased audience feedback from social in less than two hours.

The post Why it’s time to break up with your biannual brand survey appeared first on Sprout Social.

But raw data points without context don’t tell the full story. To prove how social fulfills business objectives, it’s essential to dig deeper.

In this guide, we break down the benefits of social media data collection, how to mine for meaningful data and tools you can use to automate your data collection workflows. No matter your internal audience or business focus, a data-driven approach to social media delivers transformative insights.

• What is social media data?
• How does analyzing social media data work?
• What are the benefits of social media data collection?
• 3 social media data collection methods
• 6 social media data collection tools

What is social media data?

Social media data is information collected from social media networks that demonstrates how users share, view or engage with your content or profiles, and the content or profiles of your competitors. Raw social data includes:

• Shares
• Likes
• Mentions
• Impressions
• Hashtag usage
• URL clicks
• Keyword analysis
• Follower count
• Comments
• Message volume
• Message response rate and time

Social media data also includes the insights you glean from social listening when analyzing conversations and trends related to your brand. These include conversations relevant to your company, competitors and industry at large, and often hold the answers to questions the C-suite asks (example: how are people talking about our brand online?).

How does analyzing social media data work?

Collecting raw social media data and measuring it against your goals and objectives is the process of social media data analysis. This is a vital step that reveals what is and isn’t working—both for you and your competitors.

While raw social media data can be powerful, what’s most influential is the value you provide when you make sense of the data and analyze the metrics in compelling ways. For example, many CFOs aren’t well-versed in the business impact of increased impressions or engagements. But when you share social data in the context of org-wide impacts and combine it with other data sources, you help future-proof your company and propel your business forward.

Through Sprout Social’s integration with Salesforce and Tableau, you can present social data alongside metrics from other digital channels. This customizable dashboard gives you visualizations of social, ad and email performance data without requiring time-consuming work.

What are the benefits of social media data collection?

Social media data collection has far-reaching benefits that extend to every area of your organization. According to The 2023 State of Social Media report, most business leaders agree that social media data and insights play a pivotal role across companies—including PR, trendspotting, competitor analysis, proactive crisis management and communication functions.

When social data is presented in an influential way, here are some specific ways it can improve your brand’s performance, prove the ROI of social to stakeholders and provide value to other teams.

Track metrics and KPIs

By regularly collecting social metrics, you can assess your performance to test if your strategy successfully meets your KPIs. This empowers you to make adjustments to your content and workflows on a regular basis—whether it’s quarterly, monthly or even weekly—and share reports with stakeholders to keep them informed of your progress.

Benchmark performance

Collecting social media data enables you to benchmark your content and customer care performance. With these metrics, you can compare your performance to your past data, industry averages and competitors to make sure your brand stays on track.

Understand your audience better

Insights from social provide a direct line to your target audience that will help you rise above your competition and ensure the long-term health of your business. Not only will you learn what is going well regarding your social performance, you will also better understand what your customers need from your brand and products. Essential intel you can pass along to your brand and R&D teams.

Find your best time to post

​​Though there are general best times to post on social media, you should consult social data to find your unique best practices. Through analysis, you can discover when your target audience is active and most likely to engage, and adjust your posting schedule accordingly.

Because this can be a heavy lift, try automating it to unburden your bandwidth. Sprout’s ViralPost® feature calculates your best times for you—so you always publish at optimal times without stretching your team too thin.

Improve ROI

Social data is a primary source of business intelligence that can help move your business forward. By regularly collecting social data, you can calculate and share your social media ROI—proving how essential it is to invest in social even if you face a tight budget or looming economic uncertainty. By demonstrating the value social provides your company, you set yourself up to gain critical leadership buy-in for additional tools and resources in the future.

Help reach organization-wide goals

Social data is a source of truth that will help your company refine product development, strengthen your employer brand and recruit top talent, and directly drive revenue—essential steps toward growing your bottom line. Used correctly, social insights make it easy to prove organization-wide value and facilitate cross-collaboration.

Need help presenting your social data in a captivating way? Read our Senior Social Media Manager’s tips for telling impactful data stories.

3 social media data collection methods

Let’s get into the details. Here are actionable ways to collect meaningful social media data that actually delivers the metrics you need.

1. Ask specific questions

Your social media data collection is only as good as the questions you ask. Simple questions like “how many followers do we have?” might be relatively easy to answer, but they don’t usually provide attention-grabbing insights or get to the root of what you can learn about your customers.

To ask the right questions, the social team needs a seat at the table.

As Jamie Gilpin, Sprout’s CMO, explained at a recent LinkedIn Roundtable event, “If you don’t know your organization’s most important business priorities or objectives, how can you deliver results that matter to leaders?”

If you aren’t already briefed on your company’s goals, now is the time to meet with leaders and develop a regular discourse. Or, if you don’t have direct access to your leadership team, seek support from other stakeholders who can help you uncover the information you need. Find out what keeps your CMO up at night. Learn what challenges the revenue org is facing. Discover the insights R&D wishes they had.

Through this exploration, you will uncover the right questions to ask and jumpstart high-impact data mining.

2. Find your core social media KPIs and metrics

Based on the insights you learned in step #1, you need to define core KPIs that ladder-up to your organization’s goals and keep a pulse on your social performance. These metrics will be the foundation of how you define success for your business on social. By evaluating these metrics consistently, you get the intel you need to offer thoughtful and deep understanding of your audience and the future of your business.

For example, some common KPIs for brands include audience reach, customer engagement, response times and social listening volume. You will notice these metrics aren’t always easily accessible in native social platforms.

By using a platform like Sprout Social, you can fully leverage all the data available on social and swiftly prepare presentation-ready reports. Some of our platform’s analytics highlights include:

• Cross-Network Performance Reports: Aggregate data across networks from your profiles and posts. From these various reports, you can access an overview of key metrics like impressions, engagements, video views, clicks, audience growth and message volume. You can also export granular data points to dig into day-to-day performance and compare your performance across different date ranges.

• Inbox Activity Report: Sprout’s Smart Inbox unifies your social channels into a single view so you can quickly monitor incoming messages, cultivate conversations and respond to your audience. The report gives a comprehensive overview of your team’s social care efforts. It shows trends in message volume and identifies how quickly and frequently your teams respond to messages.

• Listening Topic Insights Summary: AI-driven technology does the hard work for you by combing through billions of data points to find trends related to your brand. The report pulls total volume, engagements, impressions, unique authors and sentiment of specific topics and keywords—whether it’s your branded hashtags or the name of your new product.

3. Track conversations around your brand

Social is like a 24/7 focus group. Your audience is always sharing things they’re excited about, their challenges and their favorite products. They even share unfiltered thoughts about you and your competitors. But trying to sift through the noise to find these valuable insights can be frustrating.

Social listening can help you zero-in on this earned data and give stakeholders the answers they’re looking for. Set up a social listening query to start tracking what discussions are trending in your industry, what your audience cares about and to figure out the “why” behind you and your competitors’ performances.

Sprout’s listening solution uncovers critical insights in seconds, including:

• Listening Topic Conversation Insights: The Conversation tab of the Listening topic mentioned above provides details about the top keywords, hashtags, mentions and emoticons popular with your audience. The Smart Categories feature automatically groups trending people, places and things being discussed together, and shares performance metrics for each subject group.

• Competitive Analysis Listening tool: Compare your competitors’ fundamental metrics side-by-side with your own—including audience growth, engagement, share of voice, sentiment, impressions and post volume for each network.

6 social media data collection tools

Here’s a recap of the data benefits Sprout Social offers, and a look at some of the most popular native social media data collection tools.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social empowers you to give metrics meaning. Quickly gather, explore and share detailed data from one platform. With Sprout, you have the tools you need to demonstrate impact and influence decision making, and more time to focus on ways to reach your KPIs, fortify your strategy and prove ROI.

• Analytics: Sprout’s built-in and Premium Analytics enable you to speed up and automate data collection and reporting so you can illustrate the full value of social to stakeholders, colleagues and clients alike. Hone in on performance at the post level or zoom out to focus on your holistic impact, and easily share recurring and customizable reports everyone can understand.
• Listening solution: Harness the power of global conversations with Sprout’s powerful enterprise-ready social listening solution, built on intuitive workflows and proprietary AI-driven technology. Go beyond easily accessible raw metrics, and incorporate insights from Reddit communities, Twitter DMs, LinkedIn mentions and TikTok comments into your social data.
• Business intelligence integrations: Through Sprout’s integration with Tableau, customize your social data in an omnichannel view to pull business insights and performance metrics from a single source of truth. These dashboards contextualize social data and provide teams a more complete view of all data, making it easier for social data to influence business decisions.

Meta Business Suite analytics

Meta Business Suite consolidates the results of your organic and paid social media efforts across Facebook and Instagram in one place. You can also access the data in each of the individual apps.

With these insights, you can see metrics, trends and visual reports that can help you understand which Facebook Page and Instagram strategies work well and where to make improvements. Gain insights about your account, platform and post level, such as:

• The performance of your Facebook Page and Instagram business profile, like trends in reach.
• Your ad account’s cross-platform spend.
• Organic and boosted post content engagement, including likes and comments.
• Demographic and geographic summaries of people who like your Page and follow your Instagram business profile.

TikTok analytics

TikTok analytics help you track the performance of your videos. The platform offers video metrics, such as views, likes, comments and shares, as well as information about your profile and followers.

This data enables you to refine your content topics, identify your best posting times and find relevant trends and creators to partner with.

Twitter analytics

Twitter analytics collect and analyze audience actions on your posts or profile, such as clicks, follows, likes and expands. This data helps you track performance and improve your strategy. It’s critical for understanding who’s interacting with your Tweets and how your account is performing overall.

LinkedIn Analytics

LinkedIn analytics is a collection of metrics that helps you measure the effectiveness of your posts, updates and strategy on the platform. From the Analytics drop-down in the platform, you can track a variety of analytics, including:

• Visitor analytics: Page views, unique visitors, demographics
• Follower analytics: Followers, follower trends, organic followers, sponsored followers, demographics
• Engagement analytics: Impressions, views, reactions, comments, shares, CTR, follows, engagement rate

Google Analytics

While it’s not strictly a social media data collection tool, Google Analytics can track the conversion-generating rate of social content, which ultimately helps prove ROI.

You can set up specific reports to see how much traffic comes to your website from each social network, or use UTM parameters to track specific social media campaigns. From your dashboard, you’ll be able to keep track of metrics such as impressions, clicks, conversions, CTR, revenue per click and more.

Start collecting social media data today

Social data has massive potential for informing business decisions. Yet, much of it goes untapped. Social networks have inconsistent reporting styles that make it difficult to manually mine data effectively, and surfacing data when you aren’t tagged or mentioned is like navigating a labyrinth.

If organizations want to capitalize on all that social offers, they must refine data collection processes and tools. Using a sophisticated platform like Sprout Social to collect and analyze data empowers organizations to access real-time social insights quickly—giving companies a holistic view of their customers and a competitive advantage.

For more on commonly overlooked ways to use social data, download our guide to the 40 best ways to use social data.

The post How to collect and mine your social media data for growth appeared first on Sprout Social.

But as funding for social media increases, so do the expectations to see immediate results. Business leaders have already proven social data is an invaluable asset—now they have to demonstrate the returns on that investment. If executives want to capitalize on all that social data has to offer, they need to reevaluate how social data is internally shared and acted on across their teams.

Organizations have yet to unlock social’s true potential

As integral as social is to business success, there’s a disconnect between how executives perceive social data and how it’s actually leveraged. The reality is teams struggle to get the most out of their social investment, with 69% of business leaders agreeing that social data is currently underutilized in their organization.

Part of that is due to lack of access. Historically, access to social data was limited to platforms and tools that were technically complex to implement and required third-party interpretation. Relying on an analyst or software vendor to compile these insights often meant that information wasn’t coming in in real-time, slowing down teams whose decisions were dependent on that data.

Similarly, there are issues with how social data is shared and utilized throughout all parts of the organization, not just within the team responsible for owning social. Data reveals 56% of business leaders say they need greater collaboration between departments when it comes to using social data.

Because when social data is democratically leveraged, it can inform everything from sales strategy to product development to market research. In order to truly capture social’s value, business leaders need to reimagine how teams collaborate with each other and the tools needed to manipulate social insights at scale.

Social data is meant to be shared, not siloed

Back when organizations were wrapping their heads around the value of social media, it was standard practice to see social owned by one team like marketing or communications. Naturally, this limited who could access social data, a challenge that 35% of leaders say prevents their business from using social data to inform business decisions. But the solution isn’t as simple as handing teams like sales or finance raw, unstructured social data. There also needs to be an educational and enablement component to make social media intelligence actionable for everyone.

That means helping teams that historically didn’t use social data understand what insights they can glean from Reddit communities, Twitter DMs, LinkedIn mentions or even TikTok comments. Consider relying on your internal social experts to teach other departments what information lies beyond the likes, shares and video views on a specific platform. Don’t just say your organization is data-driven; teach your teams how to improve their data literacy. Creating a shared dashboard, for example, where you can pair social media intelligence with other data sources can help contextualize social data and provide teams a more holistic view of all business insights.

It also means executives need to lead by example and incorporate social data when making business decisions. The Atlanta Hawks, for example, use social listening insights to influence content strategies across several brand partnerships and anticipate what fans want to see from the team next. Similarly, Trek Bicycles used listening to capitalize on the sudden bike boom during the pandemic and forecast how long this trend might last. When business leaders treat social data as essential to their decision making, it can lead to tangible bottomline results and help brands build stronger relationships with their target audience.

Embrace AI or watch your competitors race ahead

When companies first started using big data, it wasn’t just their people, culture and workflows that had to change—their tech stack underwent a makeover too. Organizations had to invest in more robust tools that could store, process and analyze large data sets in a scalable and cost-effective way.

Similarly, an increase in funding for social media must be matched by an investment in more efficient, sophisticated tools. As companies reign in spending due to economic uncertainties like fear of a recession, the mantra “do more with less” is more relevant than ever before. Teams don’t have the time or headcount to manually analyze and interpret social data, especially when their competition is actively investing in those same data sources. Speed is the name of the game, and the organizations that embrace artificial intelligence in their social tools will be the ones that pull ahead from the pack.

Consider how AI can empower organizations to move faster from data analysis to action. One of the challenges we hear from customers is knowing how to extract relevant insights from social listening. With an AI-powered query builder, business leaders can get pointed topic suggestions to build better reports and waste less time tweaking their search criteria. AI can also empower organizations to move quickly by distilling unstructured social data into a handful of key headlines. Time otherwise spent summarizing raw data can be spent taking actions that have a measurable impact on your business or getting back to solving your customers’ pain points.

Of course, talks of AI adoption are always accompanied by concerns that AI will replace humans in the workforce. And yes, while it’s true that technological advancements like AI will disrupt nearly a quarter of all jobs, there’s also a net benefit we gain by eliminating redundancies or time wasted on mundane activities. Instead of looking at AI as a way to replace data analysts on your team, we need to reframe AI as a tool that can bring employees across your organization together to use social data more effectively. When teams spend less time accessing and getting to the most salient insights from data, they have more time to collaborate on opportunities that produce real results.

Don’t pigeon-hole your social media investments

These days, executives no longer need to be convinced of social’s impact on a business’ bottom line. Companies of all industries and sizes are spending more money than before on social media to gain a competitive edge that comes from the real-time insights only social media can provide.

At the same time, an increase in social funding can’t be the only variable changing at the organizational level. There needs to be a fundamental shift in how teams collaborate with one another and what tools they use to analyze social data—or businesses risk letting their social media investments fall by the wayside.

For more findings on how business leaders are adapting their workflows to further integrate social data throughout their organizations, download The 2023 State of Social Media Report today.

The post Making the most of your social media investments demands a new way of working appeared first on Sprout Social.