The Four Plug and Play Technologies to Make Social Listening Smarter

Social data is a great way to understand your customer, what they are thinking, feeling, and doing. This rich conversational data source can help you create more effective marketing strategies, spot opportunities for innovation, improve your customer experience, and show you how to sell more.  

The trouble is, it’s a noisy world out there and it can be notoriously difficult to get anything useful from the data. “Nice to know’, is a phrase often used to describe insights from social data and if you look at the typical outputs of social listening work, it’s not surprising. Wordclouds, sentiment analysis, and share of voice may have their place but they’re not giving us the actionable insights we need to know.

So, how do you find the insights you do need to know? The technology used for social listening has matured in recent years. We’ve run through four examples of how plug and play technology can make your current social listening output smarter and even help you analyze other conversational data sources.

Ready to step up your social listening?

Increase the quality of your data with AI

AI is becoming a crucial element of social listening, to cut through the noise in a way that humans can’t. AI can help you tame the noise of social data by identifying and removing irrelevant posts. And it can analyse too.

Converseon is an AI text analysis solution that has built a solid reputation in applying machine learning to language analysis, and won many awards for this work over the years.

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They are particularly good for helping you to track complex topics like trust, quality, motivation, purpose, or even your band values over long periods of time. Making them useful for brand health tracking or measuring brand purpose with the confidence that you’ve got good quality data, not irrelevant mentions or spam in your analysis. For example, they’ve helped a rideshare app measure the emotional strength of their brand to spot crisis situations and improve CX.

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Focus on communities

It’s not just what’s being said that’s important but who’s saying it. Audience intelligence is the practice of putting people and communities first. This means we can find insights into audiences, helping you focus on the communities [segments] making up those audiences. The analysis can focus on your audience, your competitors’ audience or even the people talking about a specific subject. Integrate your audience intelligence with your social listening tool to segment the communities and find out what makes them tick.

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Audiense is an audience intelligence solution. You can combine Audiense and social listening to personalise messages, find opportunities for growth by identifying new audience segments to target, optimize performance based on your audiences’ preferences. For example, in one case study, social intelligence agency, Convosphere used Audiense to create bespoke campaigns for global insurance company, MAPFRE. The impact? MAPFRE increased social engagement and decreased their CPC and CPE rate.

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Understand what people are really saying with linguistics

Reading words and working out what they’re telling you are two different things. You can use social and other conversational sources to know what people are saying but it’s not a simple listening exercise. Linguistics (the science of language) is making its way into the social intelligence world and giving us a way to understand what people mean about topics, brands, products, movements, or whatever else you’re looking to know more about.

For example, there’s a lot of ways people talk about bad customer service. If you’re a water company, you’ll want to look out for bad water taste, but what happens when beer tastes like water? You want to be able to identify and extract the irrelevant mentions.

This water tastes like crap  (aka a massive fine)

This crap taste like water  (aka crappy beer)

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Wordnerds is a linguistics-first AI-powered text analytics solution that can help you understand language. They’re building a reputation for helping companies to improve their customer experience, for example, helping Northumbrian Water to increase brand satisfaction when they are only thought of when things go wrong. But you can use Wordnerds for a number of other use cases including brand perception, competitor benchmarking, issue detection, and informing product development.

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Go deeper with psychological algorithms

You don’t need to be a behavioural scientist to apply a psychological lens to your social data, thanks to AI technology. Psychographic profiling, semantic analysis, and Natural Language Generation are all practices that mean you can unearth deep insights into the behaviour of the audiences. The possibilities are endless here. For example, you can reveal the emotional and rational drivers of your customers to learn how to increase your brand recommendations and connection. This can help you create more effective messages so you get higher engagement and ROI with psychographic segmentation.

Symanto is an AI-powered analytics solution that can help you understand how your customers think and feel about your product or brand, and what kinds of emotions they are having about them. Their tech is underpinned by AI-models focused on unearthing psychological insights about people.

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Social listening is growing up, it’s evolving. There’s more you can do with social data beyond tracking brand mentions and evaluating performance. These four tools can help you look at your data differently so you can get to the insight quicker.

Our social intelligence directory has over 200 social data analysis vendors and agencies. Search now and discover the changes happening in social listening.

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