After a year of transformation, the company has gone all-in on social. According to recent findings from the Harris Poll conducted on behalf of Sprout Social, 90% of executives believe social will be the primary communication channel for connecting with customers. But business leaders see social not only as a communication tool, but also as a valuable source of business intelligence. In fact, 85% report that social will become the primary data source to inform business decisions in the future.
Unbiased consumer, industry, and competitor insights gleaned from social can have an impact far beyond the marketing department. Social is the first place consumers turn when they need information, entertainment, or a way to express their thoughts and opinions. It’s the place you go every day to engage with the brands you love, provide feedback, and learn about new products and services. Social moves fast, which is one of its strengths as a marketing business intelligence channel. But it also means customer sentiment, brand perceptions, and cultural trends can change in minutes. Getting the most value from social business intelligence starts with being able to access and act on it quickly.
We’ll go into more detail in this article, but watch the video below for a 5-minute in-depth look at social business intelligence and how to use it, with brand examples to help you visualize how your brand is using data.
Accelerate time to social insight
In the past, business leaders may have only looked at social data retrospectively to assess performance and progress toward goals. We are now entering a new era of social media management, and that data can and should be used to drive proactive decision-making.
For example, you may notice that your old product-focused social content still consistently drives engagement, link clicks, and website traffic. Product teams might use that data to upgrade the product in question or suggest new products that will delight fans.
Or you might suddenly see a wave of customers start seeking support through social channels, concerned about service outages, product defects, or website errors. Based on these messages, your communications team can publish a statement while your product or IT teams investigate. At the same time, customer service representatives can adjust support plans, monitor the situation, and keep customers updated as the business works toward a solution.
In both scenarios, the resulting qualitative and quantitative social data also helps businesses reflect on the situation, assess impact, and apply learnings into the future.
Sprout Social’s analytics make it easy for businesses to leverage real-time and retrospective social business intelligence.
Analytics Reports Home gives Sprout users access to their social media performance across channels, from a network-level perspective to individual post performance. An intuitive interface lets you easily navigate to the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that matter most to your business.
Sprout removes time-consuming tasks from the reporting process so you can digest, apply, and share data faster. No need for data scrubbing, manual calculations, unwieldy spreadsheets, or busy dashboards. In minutes, Sprout users can customize, annotate, and export reports for presentations and share with stakeholders.
Democratizing social listening data
As more companies adopt social data as a business intelligence source, social professionals need to be trusted and empowered to share their insights. But in the future, deriving value from social should be something everyone across the enterprise can do. To make social truly part of business transformation, brands need to democratize social data.
Marketing departments already face the challenge of slow technology adoption. This is often because the tools are cumbersome or prohibitive for users who are not analytical experts. According to Gartner research, marketers use only 58% of existing technology capabilities. To increase this percentage, most companies will need to spend more time and resources on upskilling their teams.
Sprout Social is intuitive for anyone to use without a significant investment in technical training.
Social listening in particular allows anyone to zoom out beyond proprietary data and tap into larger social conversations with rich insights about their industry, competitors, and audiences. Sprout’s social listening tools connect your brand to that power source, instantly uncovering data that can power your business. Create highly customizable topics that cut through the noise and help your business.
Measure consumer perception and sentiment about your brand
Identify industry gaps your brand can fill
Discover opportunities to differentiate your brand from competitors
Unearthing inspiration for product innovation
Collect Voice of the Customer (VoC) data to improve the overall customer experience.
The user-friendly experience and easy-to-understand format allows diverse stakeholders, including marketers, customer service representatives, product developers, and executives, to derive actionable results from social listening data, even without data science experience. You can extract insights.
At Sprout, employees outside of the marketing team are also empowered to use listening data. Our sales representatives often create hearing reports on timely events and leverage those points into the sales process. Listening also helped Sprout’s cross-functional Tiger team reevaluate its business plan and focus on what customers needed most during the pandemic.
Use social listening to drive business growth
Sprout customers use listening to answer questions like “What day is leg day?” What should the next season of the podcast focus on? Who were this summer’s artists? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Sprout’s social listening tools revealed to Trek Bicycle that 2020 was the year of the bike boom. Along with the bicycle boom, the number of fans of this brand also increased rapidly. Novice cyclists and riders who had previously shown no interest in cycling suddenly became vocal bicycle enthusiasts.
To better understand these “bicycle boom riders” and what they want from cycling, the bike brand turned to Sprout’s advanced listening solutions. Listening data not only helped inform social strategy, but also influenced the brand’s overall business strategy. This helped brands predict how long this bike boom would last and how they could capitalize on it.
Making social business intelligence available to everyone
When you combine insights from direct customer communications, content performance analysis, and social listening data that gives brands a clearer picture of their overall culture, it’s not hard to see why companies are going all-in on social. The intelligence you can gather from social media not only builds your brand, but also grows your business.
Don’t risk your business being left behind in the next wave of digital transformation. Harness the power of social business intelligence with the help of Sprout Social. Try out our social listening tools by requesting a free demo.
Democratizing social listening data
As more companies adopt social data as a business intelligence source, social professionals need to be trusted and empowered to share their insights. But in the future, deriving value from social should be something everyone across the enterprise can do. To make social truly part of business transformation, brands need to democratize social data.
Marketing departments already face the challenge of slow technology adoption. This is often because the tools are cumbersome or prohibitive for users who are not analytical experts. According to Gartner research, marketers use only 58% of existing technology capabilities. To increase this percentage, most companies will need to spend more time and resources on upskilling their teams.
Sprout Social is intuitive for anyone to use without a significant investment in technical training.
Social listening in particular allows anyone to zoom out beyond proprietary data and tap into larger social conversations with rich insights about their industry, competitors, and audiences. Sprout’s social listening tools connect your brand to that power source, instantly uncovering data that can power your business. Create highly customizable topics that cut through the noise and help your business.
The user-friendly experience and easy-to-understand format allows diverse stakeholders, including marketers, customer service representatives, product developers, and executives, to derive actionable results from social listening data, even without data science experience. You can extract insights.
At Sprout, employees outside of the marketing team are also empowered to use listening data. Our sales representatives often create hearing reports on timely events and leverage those points into the sales process. Listening also helped Sprout’s cross-functional Tiger team reevaluate its business plan and focus on what customers needed most during the pandemic.