Is Social Listening a New Market Research Method?

Using a consumers input to assess a brand’s reputation is nothing new. Public Relations professionals have been doing this for decades, however, the internet has transitioned this type of brand assessment into a from of business intelligence.

An average consumer can tweet about, review or photograph a brand at any moment. This type of content is scattered throughout the web, living on different social media channels.

Social media has changed the way the public interacts with brands. This new type of engagement allows marketers to have massive amounts of consumer data available right at their fingertips.

With the right set of social listening tools, a marketer can identify what demographic talks about a specific brand the most, assess the brand sentiment of the general public and gain insight on many other things. Furthermore, this type of data mining makes it so marketers are now able to quickly conduct competitive analysis and identify where their brand is leading, and what it might need help with.

Take the example below.

This is an analysis of consumer conversations taking place on social media over the last year about Reebok, Nike and Toms.  NOTE: Charts are not actual representations of Reebok, Nike or Toms.

Reebok

Nike

Toms

Looking at this data, Reebok has a significant amount of negative comments compared to its competition. With this insight Reebok would be able to look at the negative comments and design an action plan to address them.

Now lets look at demographics.

Toms

Nike

Reebok

Based on this data we can see Toms has the youngest demographic and has more females talking about their brand. With this data they may skew their ads to woman or try to appeal to mean depending on their marketing goals.

Bottom line, consumers are posting about brands every second, and it makes sense for marketers to use this data to their benefit.

What do you think? Is data like this a true representation of a brand’s consumers? What other useful marketing insights can be gained from social listening?