Social Listening is the process by which marketers & creators look to comments or engagements to benchmark success, spot emerging trends, and inform their future campaign and partnership strategies. While many third-party solutions allow researchers to pool these engagement insights more easily, engagements alone are not sufficient to keep marketers ahead of their competition and relevant to consumers.
Social networks are moving faster by the day and video content continues to fuel that growth. To remain competitive, marketers need to see beyond the present and anticipate what’s next.
In our latest report,Watching is Better than Listening: How to build brand preference using social behavior, we explore 5 core ways to go beyond engagements with deep audience and behavior insights.
In this mini-series, we’ve cut the report into snackable segments. Here’s your first bite:
Focus on Actions
Behaviors > Engagements
The age old saying that actions speak louder than words holds true when marketers are understanding their brand loyalty. Take the superstar and social icon, Taylor Swift for example. This year, she has generated around 150M views and 1.7M engagements per month on YouTube. By looking at this metric alone, the pop-country queen herself would have little value to brands. If you were evaluating her brand perception and loyalty using a listening tool alone, only 0.011% of her audience would be accounted for.
This is an example of the “Participation Inequality” phenomenon researched by Will Hill of AT&T Laboratories. It states there is a 90-9-1 standard of online engagement. About 90% of users are scrollers, 9% comment from time to time, and 1% comment frequently.. If marketers are making business decisions based on the sentiments of 1% of frequent commenters, they’re doing so based on a biased understanding of their audience.
Check out this example with one of TikTok’s top creators, DuoLingo, to see how measuring behaviors rather than engagements proves to be much more effective.
DuoLingo, one of the most viewed brands on TikTok, gets comments from roughly 18% of viewers, indicating an 82% blindspot in audience understanding!
It’s time for marketers to get curious about the massive audiences who are watching — but not commenting.
With Tubular, you can see insights into your full audience and answer:
- What content does my audience like to watch?
- What else do they also watch?
- What do they shop for?
- What other websites do they visit?
With Tubular’s insights, we see that DuoLingo’s viewers prefer:
- Rock music > Hip hop music
- Japan travel > Mexico travel
- Nintendo Switches > Xbox Ones
From monitoring social engagements alone, it would be impossible to reach these insights.
Consumer Insights like these are vital for marketers to understand audience behaviors and target their addressable audience.
Addressable audiences for marketers
Not only does Tubular let you determine a general consensus for what audiences are shopping, but it also lets you see the number of buyers within specific audiences, and their likelihood to shop for your product.
Check out @FoodyFetish for example, social media’s #1 Food & Beverage Consumer.
Consumer Insights shows how viewers are shopping online in relation to their audience, their partners’ audiences, and their competition’s audiences. These behavioral insights link viewership to shopping behaviors which help determine which creators will actually impact ROI — regardless of audience size and comment ratios.
Brands determining who to partner with based on comments alone face a much higher risk factor than those who are making data-driven decisions. A creator’s value shouldn’t be determined by their engagement ratios or positive comments, but rather their ability to drive off-platform actions.
With these numbers, marketers can estimate the ROI of a partnership or campaign more accurately than ever before. Imagine KitchenAid wants to launch a campaign with this creator because they can clearly and easily see that FoodFetish has an addressable audience of 24M in their product category, Home & Kitchen. Assuming everyone in this audience makes a $5 purchase, they could estimate an ROI of $120M.
Hungry for more? We thought you might be. Check out the full-length report here: Watching is Better than Listening: How to build brand preference using social behavior.
And be on the lookout for the next segment of Actions Speak Louder than Words: The Social Playbook for Behavioral Data Part 2 dropping next week!