From monitoring to insight: the real potential of social listening
Many companies and organizations in Chile work with agencies or have their own “social listening” teams to monitor the situations, contexts, and actions they’re involved in.
For example, companies in the banking or mining sectors use it to keep an eye on critical situations, public backlash (“funas”), system failures, or complaints. Others, such as government entities, use it as a social thermometer to observe how the population reacts to certain measures. Some political figures even shape their campaigns and messages not always from their own firsthand opinions, but from what people are saying in their daily lives. By picking up on these online conversations, they can steer their agenda toward these “hot” topics and ride the trend.
Generally, through the hundreds of social listening tools available on the market, these companies and agencies can observe conversation behavior around almost any topic. As long as the information is public, it can be analyzed.
In Chile, as I mentioned, this use is mainly reputational: always-on crisis monitoring that sometimes even allows us to get ahead of issues.
However, this represents only part of what a good social listening service can offer. In my experience, in Chile there are still few marketing agencies that develop another highly relevant side of this research technique. Limiting social listening to only these functions means missing out on one of the richest sources of consumer insight available today.
The problem with limiting yourself to this approach is that, instead of anticipating trends or spotting opportunities, many organizations only check social listening once a problem shows up that needs solving. It’s a more reactive than proactive approach, and often it’s already too late to take action.
From monitoring to real insight
For me, and based on what I’ve seen throughout my career as a social listening analyst, it’s essential to move from this kind of monitoring to a “consumer intelligence” system.
We can break this approach down into four main areas, which also complement the functions mentioned above.
Product development
First, we can support product development for our client or company based on real users’ opinions about the product, competitors, or similar products, applying that feedback in our creative process.
Sometimes it’s easy to find things users don’t like, but the most important thing is also identifying unmet needs and going after what no one else is addressing. We can even discover unexpected uses for one of our products, which can spark new content campaigns or innovation opportunities.
Trend identification
One of the most important functions for a marketing team is staying on top of trends, but sometimes it’s hard to keep up with them day by day.
Using this technique correctly, we can generate information flows about any market, area, or specialization. We can also detect changes in our consumers’ habits and apply that information to processes of constant development and adaptation.
Consumer understanding
Understanding the consumer is often one of the most complex tasks for an insights team.
Understanding a brand’s motivations, frustrations, and “jobs to be done” can open up possibilities we’d never considered. This can even lead us to shift toward directions we thought weren’t relevant, but which can turn into the big win that consumers were waiting for.
Competitive analysis
Finally, knowing our competitors’ strengths and weaknesses can be just as important as knowing our own.
Through this approach we can stay aware of our own mistakes, but also of our competitors’ mistakes, and even get ahead of them. Something that might be a complaint against a competitor can become a strength for us, as long as we know how to spot it in time.
What we can answer through Social Intelligence
What frustrations do consumers have with current products?
What problems are they trying to solve?
What trends are emerging in conversations?
What attributes do consumers really value?
How do they spontaneously compare brands?
Is this ingredient worth it?
How to make this shift
To achieve this, a mindset shift is necessary.
Let’s move from asking “what are people saying about my brand” to “what are people saying about the category.” Let’s move from “what ingredient could we add” to “what ingredient do people like today.”
Let’s analyze conversations, not just volume. And, above all, let’s integrate this information with marketing, insights, development, and even technology, continuously, not just when it’s already too late.
So
The real value of social listening isn’t just monitoring what’s happening, but understanding what’s about to happen.
When digital conversations are analyzed with a strategic eye, they stop being simple mentions and become insights into behavior, trends, and innovation opportunities.
In Chile there’s still a lot of room to evolve from a monitoring approach to an intelligence one. Organizations that manage to make that shift will not only understand their consumers better, but will also be able to build products, campaigns, and value propositions much more aligned with what people actually need.