Going beyond Facebook and Instagram for consumer insights

When people think of social listening, they often focus on major social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. This is unsurprising given they’re the most-used social networks.

The problem is, there are restrictions on how much data brands can access through these platforms. This also puts limitations on the quantity and quality of insights they can gather. This is where other data sources such as forums, mainstream news, and podcasts, can provide additional coverage to gain accurate and actionable insights.

Data access challenges for tools

Private user profiles present the most obvious hurdle. Listening tools can’t track hashtags and brand mentions or listen in on conversations that take place on a profile that’s on “private mode.” This means you can’t get a complete picture of all the relevant conversations that are taking place.

There’s also the fact that most people often maintain a “persona” or an “image” on these major social networks. They can’t always be their authentic selves because it’s a place where their friends, family, and colleagues also hang out. That means they’re not sharing what they really think, which gives you incomplete insights into the mindset and values of your target audience.

Understanding licensed vs. crawled data

Social listening tools mainly focus on gathering insights from these social media platforms using licensed data as opposed to crawled data. Crawled data refers to the data that’s available on the public web like the list of results you get on Google search. Licensed data is the data you can access only through an explicit agreement with the data owner.

So with licensed data, you’re following certain rules and guidelines from the data owner to make use of the data. That means even though there are more steps to access it, licensed data is safer to handle than crawled data.

Platforms will typically have a data partner who provides listening tools with the licensed data they need. This partner also ensures that people on the other end of the data are complying with the platform’s guidelines and are respectful of the platform users.

Conversational data sources for better listening

The good news is that there are a wide range of data sources that brands can use to gather insights, as discussed during SI Tech Demo Day 2021. Conversational platforms like forums and podcasts are a great way to expand your social listening efforts.

Podcasts

Traditionally, social listening tools have been monitoring text. But with the growing popularity of podcasts, it’s important to start listening in on podcast conversations as well. Podcasts are often unscripted, so they’re likely to be more natural than the average well-thought-out social media post. This means there’s an opportunity to unearth some great insights into how people are talking about your brand organically.

Platforms like Talkwalker have developed speech analytics technology that can listen to podcast conversations and uncover valuable brand mentions. Through this, you can currently gather insights from a database of 35,000 podcasts. This is likely to reveal some insight that you might not get from social media platforms.

For example, let’s say you’re tracking brand mentions for a self-care app and you come across a podcast about mental wellness. This could be an excellent opportunity for a brand placement and an influencer partnership.

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You can track brand mentions in podcasts with Talkwalker[

Traditional media sources

Social media conversations may influence trends and opinions. But that doesn’t take away the power of traditional media sources. Online news stories, TV and radio broadcasts, and print media can still reach (and influence) millions of people. So it’s important to monitor these data sources for relevant conversations related to your brand or industry.

Platforms like Meltwater give you a comprehensive social listening experience by considering these traditional media sources along with social media platforms. It scans 270,000 online news sources globally along with 15 different social media channels. That means you get to cover an expansive network of data sources to get a complete picture of relevant conversations.

So for instance, you can quickly detect bad press while it’s just a brewing topic and come up with a game plan to address it.

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With Meltwater, you can see the reach each media publication has

Forums

Forums like Reddit are a social listening goldmine. They allow people the freedom to be their true selves and talk about things they normally wouldn’t on other social platforms. So they engage in authentic and passionate conversations, which can contain valuable and actionable insights.

Plus, the added insights from engagement data such as upvotes and downvotes, awards, etc. also adds further context to the conversations. This makes it a great data source  for understanding your audience, analysing market trends, protecting brand reputation, and researching new product ideas.

Reddit provides licensed data through SocialGist, its official data partner.

Expanding your social listening

While Facebook and Instagram are definitely important, they’re not the only places where social media conversations take place. So brands need to start expanding beyond these major platforms and look at other data sources for better, more accurate social intelligence.

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