Brands use social listening to gauge conversations about them in social media.

Social media listening tools, now powered by artificial intelligence (AI), are being used to discover consumer insights, measure their sentiments, and conduct marketing research. People don’t know what they want until you show it to them, said Steve Jobs. But ever so often, businesses can get a glimmer of what their consumers really want by listening to their social interactions. (aitrends.com)

Coffee shop example of social listening

Here’s a classic example of social listening from a blog by content marketing consultant Tony Tran.

You run a coffee shop as your business. One day you overhear two customers talking about your menu selection. There are appreciative, but one says your cookies are way too dry. Your ears prick up and you start checking other customers’ opinions about the shop’s cookies. You are now listening. You make changes to the cookies, and voila, customers are queueing up to buy the new cookies.

How it works

Tran says it’s a two-step process to deploy AI-enabled social listening.

The first task is to monitor social media channels and pick up relevant “chatter” about the client’s brands, their competitors, products, and crucial keywords.

The second step is to analyze the information and generate appropriate actions and responses.

Key consumer insights using AI and social listening

For example, start-up Xineoh aims to predict consumer behavior using artificial intelligence. Its founders have experience in mathematical modeling and machine learning is applied to advertising technology. The Johannesburg, South Africa-based company churns historical consumer data to find meaningful patterns. It then applies this knowledge to current consumer data to generate estimates of consumer response.

AI combines powerfully with social media and data analytics to expose trends and patterns that would be impossible to detect humanly.

At Digimind, their software helps to understand consumer insights, the competitive environment, and the market trends. The platform offers brand protection, competitive intelligence, consumer insights, influencers identification, trend tracking, and campaign analysis.

The Marketing AI Institute interviewed Linkfluence Chief Technology Officer Hugo Zanghi to uncover how social listening and AI create the most helpful consumer data possible.

Linkfluence has 250 employees in seven locations across the globe to use AI for better market research with social data. The company uses AI to collect data from hundreds of millions of social media posts, resulting in less bias, more statistical reliability, and unprecedented speed.

“AI-powered marketing intelligence is becoming the most effective way to both track brand and campaign performance online, but also to find answers to unasked but transformative questions about people and our fast-changing cultures online and offline,” said Zanghi.

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