Key Insights from the State of Social Listening Report 2023

Evolving Social Listening to Unlock Deeper Marketing Insights

The recent from The Social Intelligence Lab provides excellent insight into the current maturity of social listening. The report aimed to evaluate how this practice has developed across the industry. 

The survey results show that marketing teams commonly use social listening for measurement purposes. It helps them track brand health, analyze campaign performance, monitor competitors, and identify trends. Social listening has firmly established itself as a helpful marketing data source.

However, the report highlights that there are still challenges like data access and budget constraints. There also seems to be over-reliance on vanity metrics vs. strategic insights. This suggests an opportunity exists to evolve social listening to drive more impactful insights that can inform marketing strategy and planning. 

This post explores how marketers can unlock more excellent value from social data to elevate their understanding of customers and markets. By addressing some of the current limitations, social listening has the potential to become an indispensable strategic resource.

Current Role of Social Listening for Marketing Teams

The State of Social Listening report shows that social media platforms dominate primary data sources of social listening initiatives. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok were the top channels used by respondents. This indicates that much social listening focuses on monitoring branded social media conversations.

In line with this, the primary objectives for social data analysis are understanding attitudes and opinions, brand health tracking, and competitive intelligence. The everyday use cases are detecting trends, brand monitoring, campaign analysis, and competitive benchmarking. 

This all points to social listening being primarily leveraged for marketing measurement activities. It provides valuable feedback on brand perception, campaign resonance, share of voice, and performance vs. competitors. Key strengths are real-time monitoring and quantitative metrics.

However, over-indexing on social media limits perspective. The report showed reliance on set KPIs over applying strategic marketing frameworks. There is also heavy dependence on marketing technology for analysis vs. human interpretation. 

This suggests that social listening fails to generate deeper qualitative insights that can meaningfully inform marketing strategy and planning. There is a missed opportunity to evolve.

Challenges Limiting the Impact of Social Listening 

The 2023 report highlighted several challenges that may be preventing social listening from unlocking more marketing value:

• Budget constraints were a top concern, especially for agencies supporting social listening initiatives. Securing adequate investment is critical to fully leveraging the potential of social data.
• Lack of leadership understanding – The report showed a decline in appreciation of social listening’s value. More education on ROI and clear use cases linked to marketing outcomes is needed.
• Outsourcing analytical tasks – Brands increasingly outsource social listening work to agencies, especially for ad hoc projects and dashboard creation. This misses the opportunity to make agencies more strategic insight partners.
• Confusion on the role of technology – Many expect technology to automatically surface strategic insights from data, but expert human analysis is still essential. This gap leads to disappointment. 
• Data quality and access challenges – Desired sources like TikTok remain struggling due to API restrictions. This hinders a complete view of relevant conversations.

Addressing these challenges will be critical for social listening to evolve from a pure measurement function into a strategic marketing resource that can deeply inform planning.

Steps to Unleash Greater Marketing Value from Social Data

Based on the insights from the report, here are some steps marketing leaders can take to drive more strategic value from social listening:

• Prioritize high-impact business questions – Rather than tracking vanity metrics, focus social listening on questions that will inform critical marketing decisions and strategies. Take a more hypothesis-driven approach. 
• Apply analytical frameworks – Leverage relevant frameworks from the social sciences like segmentation, customer journey mapping, and jobs-to-be-done. This brings more strategic context.
• Look beyond social media – Incorporate data sources like forums, search trends, and reviews to understand the broader context around customer conversations. 
• Make agencies insight partners – Evolve agency relationships to focus on collaborating on strategy and extracting meaning from the data vs. just conducting tactical analysis.
• Educate leadership on potential – Demonstrate how deeper qualitative insights from social data can identify growth opportunities and influence planning.

With some incremental steps to enhance current approaches, social listening has tremendous potential to become an indispensable strategic resource for marketing leaders. The time is now to unlock greater value from social data.

It’s Time to Evolve Social Listening

As the 2023 State of Social Listening report demonstrated, social listening has firmly established its role in supporting marketing measurement. Monitoring branded social conversations in real-time and extracting performance metrics is invaluable. 

However, over-reliance on social media data and vanity metrics means there is a missed opportunity to unleash even greater strategic value. With some incremental steps like prioritizing actionable business questions, incorporating new frameworks and data sources, and educating leadership, social listening has the potential to evolve.

The time is now for marketing leaders to tap into the full potential of social data. Taking a more strategic approach, social listening can offer indispensable qualitative insights that deeply inform planning and decision-making. Brands that embrace this evolution will gain a sustained competitive advantage.

The future of social listening is bright if marketed leaders are willing to address current limitations. It can transform from a tactical measurement tool into a trusted strategic advisor with thoughtful enhancements. The promise of social data is too great not to take this next step in its maturity.

FAQ