How Social Media Listening Can Help Marketing Cos Achieve Their Goals

Part 4 is really interesting because we are learning about how to listen to what consumers are saying on social media which can help companies in both, their short and long term decisions. I am sure this is exactly what companies would like as it can help them strategise their decisions for brand awareness and monetary gains.

Social media listening has changed the rules of the game for marketers

Our instructor @babickart lists some advantages for us:

1. We can listen/monitor conversations realtime and act accordingly before things go out of control.
2. Can provide an early indicator for trends or events: consumers were looking for a gluten free alternative to beer.
3. Identify influencers in a particular space.
4. Gain a deeper understanding of how consumers perceive our brand vis-a-vis the competition.
5. Weak signals — this could give us an idea about future products that consumers may want.

Disadvantages:

1. The data can often be messy and unstructured
2. Cos will need to set up a systematic processes to identify leads

In the article “The strength of ‘weak signals”, we learnt about

Regardless of where companies observe weak signals, the authority to act on
them should reside as close to the front lines as possible. Weak signals are strategic enough to demand top management attention. They are sufficiently important to the day-to-day work of customer-service, technical development, and marketing teams to make anything other than deep organizational engagement unwise.

The interview with Tom McGrath brought out a very important point on the importance of the visual component. He mentioned that we should choose a listening partner that has image-analytics capabilities as it can happen that 50% of the conversations happens in text with the rest 50 % happens in image.

He further adds an important point on what skill do people need in social media listening?

Now we move to the three levels of Social Media Listening.

Our instructor BARBARA BICKART tells us about the the three levels of Social Media Listening. They are:

Observation and Monitoring

Data Mining

Prediction

Dubois and Haumant (2017) suggest that there are three types of data that inform marketing decisions: (a) social data, such as online conversations, which can reveal consumer preferences and sentiment about brands; (b) search data, which is linked to personal interests; and © site data, which can reflect behavioral outcomes, including purchase.

There are two types of analytic methods for Social Media data.

a. Content-based analytics: includes extracting information from online text, audio, video, and images collected from consumer-generated social media sources such as blogs, microblogs

b. Structure-based analytics: are used to map social networks and provide understanding of how information flows within these networks.

Thom Lytle, Senior Director of Social Business at Dell, tells us about how we need to learn how to use the data and what that means for their marketing plan and how they can use that for future initiatives.

And finally this part ends with how do we get consumers for co-creation. Two methods were given

1. Extrinsic Motives for Co-creation: reward or monetary gains

2.Intrinsic Motives for Co-creation: they like the brand or the product and want to genuinely see a change or improvement.