We’re living in the age of social intelligence. Social media is a great place for marketing research because people often post their thoughts publicly. This means you can get feedback from all parts of the globe, touching all segments of people.
Because of social media, it’s imperative to keep an eye on what your customers are saying about you online.
This article will discuss how to use social intelligence to learn more about your customers.
Social Media Helps You Better Understand Your Customers
For starters, social media has provided an array of social data around customers’ conversations, preferences and interests, and purchasing habits. It’s important that you know more than just your customers’ age, gender and income level. Knowing their motivations, challenges, needs and desires is imperative if you want to provide them with a great product or service.
However, it isn’t as easy as looking at your native social data.
With the massive influx in social intelligence and data, there are also new challenges to dissecting data.
- It’s hard to keep up; with 103+ social channels available, consumers collect data and engage with brands where they see fit.
- There is too much data to for one person to analyze.
- Tools help with the above, but often don’t “talk” to each other, making a 360-view nearly impossible.
Secondly, we know the connected consumer expects us to be at our best. They want …
- A tailored solution
- Real-time customer support, and
- Above-average customer experience
To truly become customer-centric, companies need to understand their buying audience inside and out. Additionally, they must know their audiences’ preferences, interests, and needs.
[Source]
Social intelligence gives you the opportunity to uncover this data. By listening to the voice of the customer and analyzing, filtering and organizing the data into the insights we can create customer segmentations that would allow any brand to be relevant at any touchpoint.
Monitoring The Conversations Happening Around Your Brand Online
Every day your brand is being discussed on social and digital channels. By monitoring what people say about your company online, understanding how they feel about it and engaging with them accordingly, you can create a powerful synergy between social media marketing your overall business goals.
At B Squared Media, we use Sprout Social’s Listening Tool to accomplish this. We’ve talked extensively about social listening in the past. Today, we’ll cover three key areas for social intelligence.
Monitoring Keywords
Notably, monitoring keywords is what most marketers think of when talking about social listening. By tracking conversations concerning your brand or product keywords, you can glean insights into consumer attitudes and gain visibility into customer experience.
Sentiment Analysis
Social listening is a great way to stay up-to-date on what people are saying about your company and products. So how do you know if the feedback is positive or negative? Sentiment analysis helps by analyzing the tone of social posts to see if they are generally positive, neutral, or negative. Additionally, the more you use this technology, the better it gets at pinpointing with accuracy what people think about your brand.
[Source]
Identifying Influencers
Social media listening is a way for marketers to identify influencers in their industry and build connections with them. Marketers can use social listening to find out what conversations are happening about their brand, products or services, as well as how customers are feeling about the company. This information can be used to determine which of those people have “influence” or the most impact on your communities.
Identifying influencers will allow you to reach more potential customers by building relationships with people who already have influence over them.
Social Intelligence Strategies For Understanding Customer Needs & Preferences
Social intelligence is the ability to read social media data and understand what it means for your business. That sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it?
Nevertheless, it’s not as complicated as you might think. Social intelligence can be broken down into three key concepts:
- Awareness – Understanding who your audiences are and understanding what they say.
- Audience Intelligence – Gathering information about an audience such as their age range or industry in order to better reach them through campaigns.
- Behavioral Analysis – Figuring out how often someone speaks with other users and whether they like to share their opinion more than others would on average. This helps companies see where customers want messages delivered that will have the most impact for increased conversions rates.
Above all, the brands who use social media as a playground for collecting consumer data and social intelligence are finding themselves winning — even in a disruptive space.
Think Conversation With B Squared Media
If you’ve been looking for an edge in your marketing strategy, this is it. By applying social intelligence to your data and customer insights, you can make better decisions about what products or services are the most relevant to them and how they prefer to interact with companies like yours.
Our team of experts have spent years building up expertise in customer intelligence and social media strategy. We can help you design a marketing plan that reaches your target audience through the channels they prefer, while also making sure to meet their needs. If you are interested in learning more about how we use this knowledge to create successful campaigns for our clients book a free 30-minute consultation with me. We look forward to hearing from you!
Latest posts by Brooke B. Sellas (see all)
- Transforming Customer Service Strategy: Being Proactive with AI - September 27, 2023
- Understanding Customer Churn: Key Insights for CMOs, Marketers, and VP’s of Digital - September 20, 2023
- Creating Emotional Engagement With Your Social Media Content - September 6, 2023
