Is Social Listening Always the Right Measure of Brand Awareness Analysis?

Authored by Novus Insights 12/11/2022

Right now, social listening is a hot topic in the marketing industry as many brands are using it as an active part of their brand awareness strategy. Their ultimate aim is to increase audience engagement. They believe that social listening is yielding a wealth of insightful data, which indeed is a fact to some extent. However, as far as brand awareness analysis is concerned, it is found that brands are partially mistaken about the richness of the data and insights they are generating through social listening. Of course, organizations are learning some intriguing facts about their brands and how their audience perceives them, but they are undoubtedly falling short of the insights they actually require to enhance brand recognition. In this article, we will decode whether social listening is always the right tool in your overall brand awareness marketing strategy.

What is social listening, and how does it work?

Social listening allows you to learn what people are saying about your brand. You can monitor consumer feedback about your company, analyze audience perceptions, and participate in conversations by employing social listening tactics and tools. Having this knowledge about your target market is essential for creating a powerful brand strategy. Social listening is generally carried out by specialized software that tracks and examines online conversations about your brand. Interestingly, it can also be initiated to learn about your competitors, enabling you to detect flaws in their services or products and come up with superior offerings. Social listening can be conducted over any length of time, and in any language and industry. You must feed the software with certain keywords for it to function as effectively as possible. That will enable it to gather the necessary data you need for your brand research. To avoid having a distorted analysis, it is also necessary to add terms that you are not interested in. The software will compile the data, divide it into three categories, positive, neutral, and negative emotion, and then aggregate it. This entire process helps brands to understand the wider picture of how the audience perceives them.

All you need to know about the 90-9-1 rule

Although social listening seems to collect a ton of information, it actually only captures the perception of a tiny fraction of the population. The 90-9-1 rule explains this scenario. Not everyone who makes use of the internet interacts with your brand. In reality, 90% of online communities are just observers. Of the remaining 10%, 9% might occasionally comment. Brand awareness analysis information gathered through social listening is derived from a mere 1% of all online users. That’s the 90-9-1 rule.

Pros and Cons of social listening in brand awareness analysis

Like every market research technique, social listening has its fair share of pros and cons. Let us look at some of them:

Pros

• Social listening gives brands access to tons of data. With hashtag use, it is easy to locate all the posts made on social media that concern a particular brand.
• Social listening can help you gather instant feedback. Gone are the days when brands had to wait a week to know how a new product is performing. Real-time audience engagement enables them to near-instantly figure out whether a new release is a hit or flop.
• By looking at the feedback and comments you get from customers, you can quickly pinpoint aspects of your products or services that need some improvement. Instead of waiting for months for surveys or other data, this enables you to initiate more immediate improvements to mitigate underlying problems.

Cons

• Finding the information you're looking for on social platforms can be challenging because as they are frequently busy and noisy.
• With the volume of fake profiles increasing every day, it is easy to get misled.
• Social listening technologies are unable to recognize sentiment or emotion, which is an important aspect of a brand's connections with customers.
• The nature of online conversations is also rapidly evolving, with a lot of them shifting from public to private settings (like direct messaging). As a result, brands are missing out on what individuals are talking about them in DMs.

Final word

Social listening is a proven brand research technique, especially when you are initiating product usability testing. However, such a tactic must be utilized smartly and with patience. Being unable to lay out a proper brand awareness campaign can hamper the quality of data and insights you collect, which, in turn, can impact your brand research. To get the most out of your brand awareness study, it is important to work with an experienced market research firm that employs state-of-the-art market research techniques. This is where Novus Insights can make a difference. We are one of the leading market research firms that can deliver actionable insights from research data using the most up-to-date market research techniques. To talk to our market research experts or get answers to all your questions about brand awareness analysis or marketing strategy, call +91 1244142292, +91 7428225350, or email contactus@novusinsights.com. You may also fill out our contact form and our market research consultants will reach out to you at the earliest.