Some of the richest data sets of consumer information are available through social media, and for anyone with the skills or software to pick though it, it’s a goldmine! To be able to have a continual finger on the pulse of your target audience is pretty much every insight-conscious planner’s dream.

Monitoring social media can just be about understanding what people are saying about your brands online but it can be so much more. In short, by listening to the mass of opinion out there, so much more can be achieved; “monitoring sees trees, listening sees the forest”  .

Cheesy as it sounds, it’s true. Real-time streaming of random comments isn’t as useful as daily analysis of important conversations. As much as I’m always going to say this, being a researcher, social media monitoring is not a substitute for research. The fact that people are talking about your brand doesn’t mean much without an idea of context and – in many cases – who isn’t talking about your brand and why can be just as important.

One theory is that there are six degrees of social media monitoring which go beyond merely collecting data and enable you to listen in on those all important conversations. Prescriptively monitoring may only show you symptoms but listening will find causes. These are the six steps to having your finger on the pulse, so to speak:

Brand mentions – at a basic level,  this is simply monitoring the number of brand mentions over time

Sentiment – essentially measures changing sentiment over time, although it has to be said, is there a difference between ‘social media sentiment’ and ‘actual sentiment’? Is this even useful – is there a correlation between brand mentions and sentiment?

Competition – neither mentions nor sentiment mean much without drawing comparisons to the competition; are people starting to talk about my competitors instead of me? Or are mentions simply declining in the category as a whole?

Direct consumer needs – unlocks the consumers specific needs by unwrapping the context around the mention; this is key to really listening to what people have to say. All sorts of things could be influencing the opinions of those you are interested in.

Indirect consumer needs – essentially the things consumers don’t know they know. For example, what consumers want from an experience with your brand rather than what attributes they would like to see.

Social needs – the most advanced of all degrees, looking at the macro-level trends of the population – seeing the forest!

When thinking about the relevance of social media findings, another important factor to take into account is being aware of your sample; as with any research, it is something that needs to be taken seriously. It is believed by some people that most social monitoring only picks up those contributors who shout the loudest and, whilst we acknowledge that these individuals may not be strictly ‘normal’ or representative of the whole audience, there is a need to include them when analysing the findings. These people have the potential to influence and shape discussions and should therefore be identified and counted.  But where then do we draw the line between what is useful and what is representative? Does social network monitoring not provide a microcosm of what happens in wider society anyway, with influencers, advocates or trend setters amidst a sea of more passive, less-engaged consumers?

There is huge potential for us to apply qualitative analysis techniques to such rich findings. After all, without perspective and skilled interpretation, how are these great nuggets of insight expected to be actionable? How can we make huge amounts of data and throw away comments relevant?