Will Social Listening Replace Surveys and Behavioral Tracking?

Editor’s Note: This post is part of our Big Ideas Series, a column highlighting the innovative thinking and thought leadership at IIeX events around the world. Michalis Michael will be speaking at IIeX North America (June 13-15 in Atlanta). If you liked this article, you’ll LOVE IIeX NA. Click here to learn more.

By Michalis A. Michael, CEO, DigitalMR

The value of social media listening becomes exponential when integrated with tracking surveys and behavioral metrics. This is when actionable insights otherwise unattainable become visible. Here are 3 use cases:

1. the net promoter score and satisfaction scores from surveys can be explained and possibly predicted by the net sentiment score* from social media listening
2. identifying specific emotions in social text can be integrated with emotional and image drivers included in tracking surveys
3. net sentiment score from social listening may predict sales and market share that appears in retail measurement reports by Nielsen or IRI

*Net sentiment score=is a score between -100% and +100% that indicates the ratio of negative Vs positive posts for a brand or a topic.

In order to set yourselves up for success the first time you attempt such data integration, you should not just look for trend correlations in the data. Even if the metrics in the data sets you are trying to integrate do not seem to correlate, this is also a very valuable finding that can lead to further investigation. Here are some additional possibilities:

1. Could it be that the ages of your survey respondents are different than the ones of the people posting on the internet? Would it help if we compare survey data of up to 50 y.o. respondents with social listening data?
2. Could there be a time lag of similar metrics between two data sets, thus one of them being predictive?
3. What can we learn if we integrate 3 or more data sets from different sources about the same/similar metrics?
4. Could social listening metrics predict the KPIs coming out of a tracking survey or a retail measurement report?
5. Since social listening is unsolicited and not dependent upon someone thinking about what questions to ask, we may discover something unexpected!
6. Everything new that we discover in a social listening report could further be probed in a survey or qualitative research, ideally on a private online community for on-demand insights.

Granted, today we may not be able to replace our brand trackers with social listening tracking 100%, but as more and more consumers get connected on social media this may soon become feasible. There are predictions that more than 5 Billion smartphones with access to broadband will be owned by 2020. This means that in most countries we will have over 90% broadband penetration. This is a game-changing statistic. Are you getting prepared for that time? Do you already complement your brand tracker insights with social listening?