How to complement your tech stack with audience insights

There’s an abundance of social listening tools in the market, which gives businesses a wealth of technology options to choose from. However, there’s a difference between simply being able to track social media conversations, and using them to really extract valuable insights. This is where it’s crucial to ensure that you complement your social listening tech stack with the right data and tools.

During Demo Day 2022, Luke White, VP of Commercial at Audiense showed how their solution can provide the type of audience insights needed to complement your social listening tech stack.

The importance of audience insights

The Audiense Intelligence platform aims to connect the dots and complement rather than overlap with your existing tech stack. It functions on the belief that demographics don’t work. Take, for example, Kanye West and Michelle Obama. They were both born in Chicago and are the same age. They’re both wealthy and are considered celebrities. They’ve also both been married and have children. However, they’re far from similar if you look at them as individuals because people are fluid and layered.

The platform focuses less on defining people based on their demographics, economic status, and occupation. Instead, the focus lies on the needs and values of the individual. It tries to uncover what’s driving them to make a decision and what their passion points are.

This helps to bring forward cultural relevance and cultural understanding.

Segmentation through inter-connectivity

Audiense bases its audience segments on inter-connectivity–essentially, who follows who within an audience. We can then ask the question “What’s unique about these people?” This helps us to understand why they’re interconnected or why they follow each other. “Once we understand that uniqueness, we can bring forward those passion points, that cultural relevance, and cultural understanding,” Luke explained.

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So now the goal is to add that methodology to your social listening by adding the follower graph. Without this, it’s just noise because you’re not understanding those passion points and those individual cultures that are building that conversation.

Complementing social listening

Adding follower graphs to social listening conversations helps to make social listening more digestible. It helps businesses to cut through the noise and plan around individual cultures.

You can take these segments, export them, and put them back into your social listening tool of choice. The value then is you’re essentially streamlining your social listening work by tracking individuals rather than keywords or hashtags. “So you’re essentially using our segments as an author panel,” Luke elaborated.

He gave the example of their work with Pulsar in which they’re tracking conversations around Wu-Tang Clan. The assumption is that the conversations would be dominated by old-school hip-hop fans. But what we see is the cultures that made up the conversation are actually quite far from those hip-hop fans. In fact, the hip-hop fans are among the smaller segments. The largest segments were based on Black creators and entrepreneurs. Millennial Xbox gamers were the second-largest segment, followed by PC gamers.

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If you’re exporting segments and manually using that as an author panel or a focus group back into your social listening tool, you’ll be able to see how each individual segment or each individual culture is essentially driving that conversation in a different way. You can see who’s creating the biggest buzz, who’s essentially sharing content differently, and what type of content they’re sharing.

Through this process, you’re matching handle IDs against the Audiense enriched data engine. That enriched data engine is made up of approximately 1.1 billion individuals. The largest source of that data engine comes from the platform’s partnership with Twitter, which gives full archived API access to every single Tweet and follower engagement since 2006.

“That follower engagement is how we run our segmentation and where we add the follower graph to your conversation. That’s where we bring forward those passion points,” Luke explained.

Complementing other tools

While social listening is the biggest focus, the audience insights from Audiense can also be used to complement survey panels. “They take the characteristics, the behaviours and the affinities of the individuals within our segments and match them within their own survey panel. So they’re finding a similar audience within the world of surveys,” Luke elaborated.

“We’re taking the understanding that we have of an audience within a survey and using that to identify more niche, granular audiences within social. We can help to join the dots and enhance what you’re doing.”