Using social data: What can brands learn from other industries?

It’s great to have a really deep understanding of your target audience and the industry you work in, but sometimes you need to try something different in order to stand out, or see some results. You could get a lot of new ideas and interesting ways to apply social data by looking at what brands in other industries are doing.

Let’s take a look at how brands across different industries are using social data.

Retail: Walmart

For big box retailers like Walmart, the pandemic put a spotlight on the power of social data. At the start of the pandemic, Walmart saw stores going out of stock as people rushed to the stores and hoarded certain items.

In the midst of all the chaos, social listening provided them a way to calmly look into the minds of the customers. Angela Berger, Director of Insights & Analytics at Walmart explained that they used social data to understand out how people were talking about their experiences in the stores.

These efforts enabled them to work out the pressure points in real-time, such as long queues at their stores, or problems with online shopping. It helped them understand how to better communicate with customers about limited supplies of items like toilet paper. It also guided them on how to create social distancing in the stores.

FMCG: Mondelez

Mondelez, which deals in fast-moving consumer goods, injects social listening data into other data sources in order to add the Voice of the Customer into the broader business strategy.

Melissa Davies, Real-Time Insights Manager at Mondelez explained that this provides a human element. It helps to build a connection between consumer behaviour and the intention behind those behaviours.

At Mondelez, they use a robust and quantitative survey to understand snacking behaviour. And social listening can supplement the insights from the survey with consumer quotes such as, “I’m in lockdown and I’ve eaten all my snacks and it’s only day 2.” This combination helps to tell a bigger, more comprehensive story.

Sport: City Football Marketing

Social data can also be used in a reactive way. Jennifer Knott, who works at City Football Marketing as a Research and Insights Executive explained that the company uses social listening to measure the performance of campaign launches, kit launches, and football games.

Her team looks at conversations regarding relevant teams and analyses things like sentiment, conversation volume, and the topics driving those conversations. They regularly maintain tracking reports for the different sport clubs under the organisation, outlining things like online share of voice and how they compare to the competition.

Insurance: MAPFRE

Social data plays a critical role in content ideation and campaign planning for companies like MAPFRE. In order to tailor their communications, they looked to understand their audiences better.  They started by segmenting their audience into six groups, and monitoring their conversations to learn more about each segment.

They then identified the topics that these segments were most interested in and were relevant to MAPFRE’s objectives. This included conversations about major life events, entertainment, key financial decisions, and health and well-being. Using this information, they further profiled each audience segment based on needs, values, and personality traits to create personas.

MAPFRE was able to determine the message types and products that were most relevant to each audience persona. This then drove their content creation strategy. Their content marketing development team came up with unique creatives to resonate with those distinct interests and personality traits. The personalised messaging drove much better engagement on average compared to non-personalised ones.

Healthcare: Convosphere

One of the most revolutionary uses of social data is in the field of healthcare. Social intelligence and insights agency, Convosphere realised that social listening can help to understand the unmet needs of people living with rare diseases.

Drug manufacturers have been facing many challenges in researching cures for rare diseases because of the perceived lack of commercial benefit and other logistical difficulties. Social listening insights can help to fill-in those real-world gaps, enabling them to identify the unmet needs of rare disease patients, map the patient journey, and understand how to better develop and position treatment.

Convosphere found that rare disease patients often come together to a single social media platform to discuss their condition with other patients even if they’re scattered geographically. These forums can serve as a rich data pool to understand the rare disease space better.

Enriching your social listening efforts

Understanding how brands in other industries are using social listening data can inspire you to enrich your own social listening efforts. Hopefully these examples give you a few ideas on how to broaden your social listening strategy to make it more robust and extract more value from it.

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