How can you use social listening to inform your social media budgeting?

Social listening helps develop a deep understanding of diverse audiences characteristics, such as demographics, psychographics, preferences, unmet needs and expectations. Over time, social listening reveals the changing cultural undertones and choice-evolutions which can inform budgetary allocations across channels. For instance, during COVID-19 pandemic, in-person interaction was restricted due to lockdowns. As a result, promotion of certain types of products (e.g., facial aesthetics) had to be to social channels such as instagram and TikTok where the audience activity rapidly increased. Social listening early-detected such audience behavior which informed the promotional mix to ultimately deliver higher ROI on marketing investments.

Social listening provides insights into “customer voice” which can inform content. In my experience, a blend of NLP and qualitative analysis is needed to identify critical content strategy drivers such as themes, topics of interests, sentiment and informational needs. These insights help develop content relevant to users and discover information gaps. In one example, social conversation analysis highlighted the low awareness about risks due to high triglycerides. This led to an engaging educational campaign across channels aimed at high risk targets, which paved the way for an effective launch. Further, effective social listening also saved potentially wasteful investment in releasing advanced information too early during the launch.

Social listening is a direct way of understanding the audience's pulse and brand-perception vis-a-vis competition. Most leading social listening tools allow near real-time tracking. A limited-time social media promotion can be used to gauge initial user response which can inform a larger initiative. In one instance, a consumer health company launched three time-limited experimental promotions to understand user response. Social listening conducted in parallel provided insights from promotion-related user conversations and measured brand sentiment and perception. This helped in identifying brand strengths to amplify brand messaging, engage audiences and quickly test promotional effectiveness to inform long-term investment decisions.

Social listening tools allow campaign-tracking across platforms and help in measuring the audience reaction to the campaign. This can help in determining campaign success against pre-set benchmarks as well as allow comparison with competitor campaigns. Besides quantitative metrics such as clicks and conversion, modern listening tools also provide qualitative KPIs such as sentiment, tonality, conversation topics which can be used to alter/improve ad copy, targeting parameters and channels. In one instance, a pharma company used social listening to better match the ad display time with audience activity time on Twitter, thus generating higher clicks, reactions and engagement.

Social media is a reliable source of competitive benchmarking information. Most leading social listening tools monitor a variety of important brand KPIs vis-a-vis competition, such as volume of mentions, sentiment, conversation themes, trending topics, activity peaks and trend evolution. These KPIs are useful in assessing organic as well as comparative performance of campaigns, promotions and awareness initiatives. A leading global consumer electronics and home appliances brand used social listening to measure campaign performance and benchmark it against competitor campaigns as well as previous campaigns, thus allowing efficient performance optimization. Further, real-time trends monitoring informed creation of engaging content for users.

Social listening is a significant source of understanding how consumers experience products. Aggregating insights across thousands of consumer experiences can offer a perspective on how the product performs and help its broader positioning. For instance, in healthcare, social media can be a great source of patient experience as they undergo certain treatments. Insights from their journey on a treatment, its effectiveness, their unmet needs and condition management challenges can inform digital patient support programs, thus enhancing health outcomes. Such analysis can also form the basis of real-world evidence which can be used in market research for developing new products and perform cost-benefit analysis.