How to Use AI for Social Listening

Understanding your target audience is essential for the success of your marketing efforts.
Apart from collecting all the relevant information about your customers, such as their needs, interests, preferences and pain points, you should also obtain feedback regarding their satisfaction with your products, services and brand.

However, that’s not always enough, as it’s likely that many customers talk about your brand on social media and share their experiences with others. If you don’t tap into this great source of consumer data, you’ll miss out on a lot of valuable insights.

Social listening tools will help you uncover all these insights through monitoring brand mentions, conversations about your brand, relevant keywords, industry trends or competitor mentions. This way, you’ll be able to identify an overall sentiment around your brand and gain control over how it’s perceived.

By adding AI to the equation, social listening tools can be even more powerful. Here’s how to use this technology to your benefit.

Put the Information in Context

Facebook users post more than 510,000 comments and 293,000 status updates every single minute.

Twitter users send approximately 6,000 tweets every second or 500 million each day.

These stats show that social media users, in general, generate massive amounts of data on a daily basis, which means you need a tool capable of sifting through all that noise to find relevant pieces of information for your brand.

All these tweets, updates and posts contain different types of content, including text, video and images that can’t be organized into structured databases and spreadsheets. This unstructured data can’t be analyzed with traditional analytics tools, and that’s where big data analytics comes into the picture.

AI-powered data applications paired with social listening can make sense of both structured, semi-structured and unstructured data, and unearth valuable insights from otherwise incomprehensible streams of tweets, messages and updates.

What’s more important, though, is that such tools can leverage sentiment analysis technology and identify how your customers feel about your brand. For example, companies such as Apple or Starbucks garner thousands of mentions every day, and without an AI-powered social listening, an issue can snowball into a PR disaster by the time they spot a surge in negative sentiment.

Leverage Real-Time Interactions

Social media is one of the best ways to reach out to your customers and keep the lines of communication open.
It’s no wonder that brands increasingly integrate customer support and care in their social media listening strategy. Using conversational chatbots on your website, as well as social media channels, can transform your customer experience by resolving customer issues in a timely manner and responding to requests and queries 24/7.

But why wait for them to reach out to you when you can create opportunities by analyzing mentions of your brand? AI-powered social listening tools can analyze a large number of social media posts and distinguish between those that are about or related to your brand and ones that are not.

Apple is a great example because a traditional, keyword-based tool might take the mentions of the eponymous fruit, apple pie, apple cider or Big Apple into consideration when processing relevant information.

With the help of AI-powered social listening tools, you can filter out all the irrelevant mentions and respond to those who mentioned your brand, thus initiating meaningful conversations with them.

Analyze Visual Content

According to Cisco, 80% of global internet traffic will be video by 2021.

This format is particularly popular on social media channels, meaning you can’t afford to neglect it and only focus on monitoring text mentions.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, it’s possible to leverage image recognition technology and identify logos, brand names, and different objects. This way, you will be able to detect brand mentions that aren’t explicit within the accompanying text and understand the context of a discussion containing your brand name, products or services.

The same applies to images, as sophisticated AI tools can recognize images related to your brand and even understand the sentiment behind them. By taking advantage of all kinds of user-generated content such as images and videos, you can obtain in-depth insights into what your customers actually think about your brand.

This type of feedback is particularly valuable and can create high-quality sales and promotional opportunities.
AI is no longer just a buzzword tech companies and startups use to attract the attention of any potential customers. You can greatly benefit from leveraging AI-powered social listening tools in your marketing strategy, as they can save you a lot of time and resources, and help you feel the pulse of your target audience.