Social media is a hot spot for strong opinions, beliefs, and values. It’s become a top source of information for online sleuths to learn more about the people around them. There’s a good reason for that: People share anything and everything on social media, and social media intelligence tools can help you harness valuable insights.
Social listening and analytics tools and software only tell part of the story. When you tune into conversations your audience is having every day, you can be better prepared to connect with them in authentic ways. You can learn more about their needs and behaviors, including what they’re buying and how they’re buying it.
Here’s how social media intelligence can become one of your biggest competitive advantages.
Contents:
What Is Social Media Intelligence?
What Is an Example of Social Media Intelligence?
Social Media Intelligence vs. Social Listening
Why Social Media Intelligence Matters
5 Key Components of Social Media Intelligence
Tools for Social Media Intelligence
Implementing Social Media Intelligence Strategies
FAQs about Social Media Intelligence
What Is Social Media Intelligence?
We define social media intelligence (SOCMINT) as the process of collecting and analyzing social media data to learn more about your audience. It goes beyond social media metrics measurement, which tends to focus on things like engagement rates and views.
You can use intelligent insights to make decisions about marketing, product development, or expansions into new markets.
Social media intelligence gives you a superpower in our digital age, where every post, Reel, and story tells you something about your target audience. Rather than scrolling through your social feeds, you’re understanding the what and why behind every like and share.
What Is an Example of Social Media Intelligence?
Here’s how you might apply SOCMINT to your marketing:
Let’s say you’re launching a new product and want to see how the product is being received by your audience. You can use social media intelligence tools like Meltwater to gather data from Twitter, IG, Facebook, and Reddit. You have marketing metrics and KPIs to meet, and this data can help you prove your effectiveness.
To do this, you would set up keywords to monitor every mention of those terms. You could use a mix of the product name, what the product does, your brand name, and other terms your audience might use when talking about the product.
SOCMINT tools use a combination of AI and data analytics to find social media mentions and understand their meanings. You can analyze the tone of each mention and find out how people feel about the new product.
Social Media Intelligence vs. Social Listening
Both SOCMINT and social listening give you ways to collect and learn from social media data. They’re not quite the same, though; social listening is a part of social media intelligence.
| Social Media Intelligence | Social Listening |
|---|---|
| What It Is: | What It Is: |
| - Extracts actionable insights from social media data | - Monitoring social channels for mentions |
| - Applies advanced analytics and data-mining techniques | - Checks for specific keywords or competitors |
| What It's For: | What It's For: |
| - Strategic analysis of trends, finding influencers, and monitoring competitor activities | - Gathering data about brand mentions, customer feedback, and online conversations |
| Why It's Done: | Why It's Done: |
| - Inform business decisions and develop new products | - Respond to customer needs |
| - Create more effective marketing strategies | - Improve customer service |
| - Understand the market on a deeper level | - Adjust marketing strategies based on what people are saying |
Social listening involves monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitors, or specific keywords, and understanding what people are saying in real time. The main goal is to gather data about brand mentions, customer feedback, and online conversations to make improvements based on what people are saying.
TIP: Find out everything you need to know about social listening with our free Ultimate Guide!
Social media intelligence goes beyond social listening to turn the data into actionable insights. It’s broader and more strategic, encompassing everything from analyzing trends, identifying influencers, monitoring competitor activities, and detecting patterns in large datasets across multiple platforms.
Ultimately, social listening is reactive, while social media intelligence is proactive. Both play an important role in staying engaged on social media and driving your business strategy forward.
Why Social Media Intelligence Matters
Businesses across industries and the public sector benefit from what social media intelligence can reveal. These findings provide valuable insights that can help businesses make informed decisions.
With so much data generated on social media channels, companies can leverage this information easily and strategically to:
- Understand consumer sentiment
- Perform a competitive analysis
- Find new trends and opportunities
- Monitor share of voice
- Manage crises
- Identify potential influencers
- Optimize marketing campaigns
- Create innovative products and services
- Enhance customer service
- Fight against disinformation or misinformation
The “intelligence” component helps to turn this data into actionable insights. It’s not just about facts and figures, but also knowing what to do with the information.
5 Key Components of Social Media Intelligence
Social media intelligence is a smaller slice of consumer intelligence. It gives you a well-rounded picture of your audience specifically on social media along with your own performance in shaping their opinions. To do this, you’ll need to combine several components:
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis helps businesses understand the emotions and opinions behind social content. It uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to classify content as positive, negative, or neutral.
Engagement data
Engagements like likes, shares, and comments indicate your content struck a chord with your audience (for better or worse). If people are liking and sharing your content, it’s a good sign they found it relatable. You can use this data to learn more about what your audience likes, wants, or responds to.
Real-time alerts
Social intelligence can give you an ongoing view into your social media efforts. Real-time alerts notify you when you have a spike in activity so you can react and respond accordingly.
Reporting features
Reports that compile data in one place give you a way to benchmark your performance and track progress. You should be able to customize these reports to compare data side by side, such as comparing your brand to competitors, or even comparing your performance in different regions.
TIP: Struggling with reporting? Check out our Marketers Guide to Unified Reporting for a full breakdown!
Easy-to-digest insights
The ultimate piece of social media intelligence, your tools should provide a general overview of its findings each day. Rather than bombarding you with facts and figures, overviews can give you a rundown of the most important information and why it matters.
Tools for Social Media Intelligence
You don’t have to scroll through every feed every day to see what people are saying about your brand. Consider using purpose-built social media monitoring tools, like these:
Meltwater
As a complete media intelligence platform, Meltwater monitors billions of data points in real time, both online and offline, to give you up-to-date insights and alerts. Link Meltwater to your social channels, specify the keywords or topics that matter to you, and start collecting intelligence.
Meltwater sends you alerts, compiles data from multiple networks, and gives you an AI overview of what’s happening on your channels. You can spend less time digging through the data and more time actually using it.
Google Alerts
An underrated tool in social media intelligence, Google Alerts is a free tool that you can use for social media monitoring. Set up your mentions and get a daily email of where content was published using those mentions. You can get a direct link to published content and check it out for yourself.
While these alerts don’t come with actionable insights, you can learn more about who’s talking about your topics, find potential influencers or media partnerships, and see how others are talking about your topics.
Social media analytics
Social media analytics can tell you many things, even though they’re not as comprehensive as social intelligence tools. Check the analytics on your chosen social platforms, such as Meta Business Suite for Facebook and Instagram.
You can use your findings (e.g., engagement rates, top-performing posts) to decide the next best steps for your social media marketing.
Your website analytics
Website analytics take the social media conversation a step further. You can see how people who have interacted with you on social media are checking out your website, making purchases, or engaging with you beyond the social pages.
Implementing Social Media Intelligence Strategies
From finding trending topics to responding to potential crises, Meltwater helps you craft an intelligent social media presence. Our platform analyzes conversations around topics you care about so you can connect with your audience in new and better ways.
Meltwater lets you monitor unlimited topics and keywords. See when mentions spike, get a real-time view of engagement, and compare your performance over time with custom reports.
FAQs about Social Media Intelligence
Still have questions? Check our FAQ for more info.
What is social media intelligence used for?
Social media intelligence applies to a wide range of use cases, including product development, marketing strategies, crisis management, and other business decisions.
What is the first step toward gaining social media intelligence?
SOCMINT platforms like Meltwater give you turnkey social media intelligence. Using a ready-made infrastructure, you can start tuning into all social media channels (including up-and-coming Chinese social media networks) and learning about your audience.
What is the difference between social listening and social intelligence?
Social listening tells you the “what”; it tracks mentions of your brand or other choice keywords. Social media intelligence tells you the “why”; it uncovers patterns to help you make strategic decisions.
