Social media represents the world’s largest, most diverse and accessible focus group. It’s a marketer’s fastest feedback loop, offering authentic opinions and candid reactions to the content and messages disseminated by brands and businesses. And while actively monitoring your social channels to ensure timely engagement is paramount, mining social data by listening for marketing insights can have an impact far beyond the platforms they’re found on. The savviest marketers use social listening to refine their content strategies, inform marketing campaigns and improve overall customer experience—on social and beyond.
Today, we’re pleased to announce Listeners, a new social listening toolset that complements Sprout’s extensive social monitoring features and builds upon our existing turnkey, historical and performance-based listening reports. With Sprout’s Listeners, marketing professionals have the tools necessary to search for keywords, hashtags, brands, industries and multimedia content to analyze sentiment, find topic correlations and uncover trends.
Listeners is available as a premium add-on to the Corporate and Enterprise plans. Account Owners and Managers in these plans will start seeing a preview of Listeners today.
Intuitive Access to Powerful Social Data
In order to provide intuitive access to the data necessary to power a successful listening strategy, we approached Listeners with several themes in mind.
First: Simplicity. In true Sprout fashion, our focus was on ease-of-use without compromising the power of the data. You’ll see this reflected in the intuitive query building experience and the depth of the Listener insights.
Second: Access to high-value data. To ensure the most productive listening experience, we’re focused on limiting the noise and only surfacing social data that can lead to actionable marketing insights. To that end, Listeners starts with Twitter.
Twitter data is open, real-time, conversational and distributed which lends itself to an unmatched breadth of consumer and industry insights. Twitter truly is the world’s largest, most accessible focus group and Listeners will allow you to tap into it. We fully intend to add additional sources in the future, but we’re confident that mining Twitter data alone will add incredible value to your organization.
Lastly: Listeners is built alongside Sprout’s best-in-class engagement, publishing and analytics toolsets creating a seamless experience. While social listening as a practice can already be found in many features throughout the entire Sprout platform, Listeners rounds out a comprehensive social listening solution that spans the spectrum from real-time brand monitoring all the way through analyzing social data for marketing insights.
Elevate Your Marketing Strategy With Listener Insights
The Listeners experience starts with the Query Builder, an intuitive interface to easily create basic and advanced queries even without knowledge of complex boolean syntax and rules logic. With a real-time previewer that supports dynamic, in-line refinements, you can ensure you’re focused on the most relevant results before committing to tracking the Listener.
From Listening Home, you can easily access your query results through Listener dashboards that facilitate real-time and ongoing analysis of any topic, hashtag, brand, industry and more on Twitter.
Within each dashboard you’ll find a bevy of Listener Insights that uncover not just what people are saying, but also how they feel, any related context and where these conversations are happening. Listener insights include:
- Engagement Analysis to track aggregate message volume, potential reach, likes, Retweets and replies as well as an interactive chart to plot engagement trends over time.
- Interactive Topic Analysis that surfaces related topics and hashtags and uses Sentiment Drivers to expose which topics are contributing to negative vs. positive sentiment.
- Sentiment Analysis to understand the overall percentage of messages within a query that are positive, negative and neutral. You can learn more about Sprout’s sentiment analysis model here.
- Geographical Analysis to visualize where conversations are happening around the world including the ability to drill down to the region, state and city levels.
Turn Data Into Actionable Insights
With access to deep qualitative and contextual insights through Sprout’s social listening toolsets, marketers have the potential to drive their brands forward in myriad ways:
- Inform marketing campaigns: Observe trends in relevant social conversations, surface inspiration from user-generated content and identify trending topics related to your brand to inform cross-channel strategy.
- Adjust content strategy: Uncover patterns in the types of stories and messaging that drive engagement and action on social and use the learned insights to build content that truly resonates.
- Influence brand strategy: Gauge emotional resonance by measuring and analyzing sentiment to better understand your brand’s perception in the marketplace.
We’re Just Getting Started
Sprout’s mission is to help organizations and businesses of all sizes become better marketers, create stronger relationships with their customers, be more informed decision makers and create the world’s most beloved brands. Listeners aligns perfectly to this mission by providing access to the data and insights to do all of those things. And this is just the beginning for Listeners. More data, additional sources and deeper insights are all on the horizon.
To get started, reach out to your Sprout representative or request a demo.