Cutting Through the Noise: The Impact of AI on Social Listening Trends

Listening to what's being said about their product, service, or brand has always been a core part of marketing. Digital marketing made it more real-time with social listening. Brands and marketers have been relying on social listening for a while now. This is all changing thanks to AI. Let's see what possibilities lie ahead.

Let’s meet social listening,

Market research methods like customer surveys and focus groups remain very helpful for getting a pulse on the market. With social media and online communities, collecting and analyzing customer feedback has never been easier, faster, or more fun. It made it easy for marketers to track what customers are saying about their brand and its industry online. It involves tracking mentions of certain keywords, phrases, or brands, and analyzing the data. Monitoring social media isn't all there is to social listening. It includes blogs, forums, news websites, and other online platforms where your brand might be discussed.

and understand how it can benefit brands.

Nowadays, social listening is an integral part of a brand's digital strategy, providing real-time data that can shape marketing, customer service, and product development. In this digital age, where consumers are constantly connected and vocal about their experiences, social listening matters more than ever. Brands can stay in touch with their audience's needs, preferences, and sentiments, allowing them to make better decisions and build stronger relationships.

Understanding customer sentiment is one of the most prominent uses of social listening. Brands can gauge how customers feel about their products, services, and overall image by analyzing online conversations. The insight is invaluable for identifying trends and shifts in sentiment that could affect a brand's reputation.

Brands can also keep an eye on their competitors with social listening. Brands can differentiate themselves and stay ahead of the market by monitoring competitor activities and strategies.

Another benefit of social listening is real-time customer engagement. Brands can respond to customer inquiries, complaints, and feedback right away, showing that they care. The proactive approach not only improves customer satisfaction, but also builds loyalty and trust.

It's great for discovering unmet customer needs and preferences, which can be used to inform product development. When brands analyze customer feedback, they can identify gaps in the market and create products or features that address them.

Another benefit of social listening is effective crisis management. Detecting PR issues early and resolving them quickly is possible by monitoring online conversations.

AI has put social listening on steroids,

AI has put social listening on steroids by enhancing data processing and analysis capabilities. Using AI-driven tools, brands can get timely and actionable insights from massive amounts of data in real time. They can spot patterns and trends that human analysts might miss, so brands can make better decisions.

The AI in social listening tools analyzes sentiment and context of online conversations using Natural Language Processing (NLP). The NLP helps these tools understand nuances of human language, such as slang, sarcasm, and regional dialects. By doing so, brands can get a more accurate sentiment analysis and better understanding of what customers think.

Predictive analytics is another big advancement brought about by AI. AI can predict future market trends and consumer behavior by analyzing historical data. This allows brands to stay ahead of their competition by proactively adjusting their strategies.

Automated responses and engagements are also possible with AI-driven tools. AI chatbots or AI agents can handle routine customer questions, provide personalized recommendations, and escalate complex issues to human agents. Not only does this improve efficiency, but it also ensures proactive social listening so that customers get answers when they need them.

and impacting its growth and ability to deliver business value.

Considering the value social listening has been delivering to brands and marketers, and the powerful analysis and insights that can be generated with AI, social listening powered by AI seems very promising. However, considering some recent developments in AI, I'd like to hold on to this thought.

In my view, social media platforms and the advancement of artificial intelligence are the two sides of this coin. Social media platforms have always had a closed-open model. They're closed because you have to register with them to access their features. At first, they didn't let third-party tools like post scheduling apps or competing platforms access their feeds. They gradually opened up using APIs. This led to cross-platform tracking and data flow.

On the other hand, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta used the data on their servers to train their AI models. However, AI turned out to be a data-hungry beast. This has led companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to buy data, even if it meant walking the fine line of violating intellectual property rights. Since they're developing their own AI, social media companies like Meta, Twitter/X, and Microsoft are blocking access to their data.

Besides social media platforms, websites with high traffic and domain authority are increasingly disallowing crawling of their content for AI training. So tech companies are having a hard time training their AI models with up-to-date, varied and diverse data. I talked about this in an earlier episode. I'll put a link below for you to check it out.

How does the future of AI and social listening look like?

Social media networks are throttling APIs and public websites are blocking content, which not only shuts out AI, but also makes social listening hard. Social listening might lose its effectiveness and business value if this trend continues. Where do we go from here? Do we see a decline in social listening? It doesn't seem that way.

Because of two things. The pace of AI advancements isn't slowing down. The trajectory of its applications might change. In addition, social media platforms, online communities, and websites will continue to support third-party social listening tools for the simple reason that it's essential to attracting brands and their ad dollars.

I see three possibilities for social listening. The emergence of AI-driven social listening features could be one. YouTube's planned comment summarization feature is an example. Social listening platforms could then integrate with these platforms through APIs. It could also be a paid feature. One example is Twitter/X's Creator Hub, which can be subscribed to for a monthly fee.

A next possibility would be to extend the first one where basic social listening capabilities are offered in-platform and APIs are provided for restricted access to data. Brands could then use these APIs to build social listening tools customized to their businesses.

Another possibility is deploying AI agents specifically for social listening. Google, Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, and other tech companies have already introduced AI agents. They could then be trained for social listening to give brands rich consumer insights without scraping data and compromising IP.

The cornerstone of online marketing is the measurability of brand reach and engagement. And social listening is a key component that helps brands get a market pulse. AI is already making it easier, more insightful, and more effective. Whether social listening's future lies in the possibilities I mentioned earlier or new ones emerge, its relevance will only grow.