social media listening case study

• Social Media Management
• Social Media Marketing

Three Social Listening Case Studies to Motivate You

Written by Anna Sonnenberg

Last modified Mar. 29 2022

Table of Contents

For savvy marketers, social media is much more than a place for publishing posts and running ads. It’s also a channel for listening and responding to customers.

With a social media listening strategy, you can tune into what customers and prospects are saying about your brand. You also can grow your business in the process.

How does social listening work? How can you include it in your team’s workflow? Let’s use these three social media listening case studies as examples.

What Is Social Listening?

Social listening is the process of finding and analyzing conversations about your brand, competitors, industry, and marketing via social media. Then you use those insights to grow your business.

On the surface, social listening is similar to social monitoring, which involves identifying and responding to relevant conversations on social media. However, social listening takes the process a step further.

With social media listening, you also gather data and draw conclusions to make smarter business decisions.

Why Is Social Media Listening Important?

By listening to conversations on social media, you can gain valuable information about your brand, your competitors, and your industry.

Here are some of the best ways to leverage social listening.

Social media listening tip: 1. Assess brand health

How are customers and prospects feeling about your brand? Are they excited about the new product line you announced? Do they think your product quality has gone downhill recently?

Social listening helps you keep an eye on the health of your brand and gives you a sense of customer sentiment. As you gather social business intelligence , you can pass it along to relevant departments. That way, they can double down on existing efforts or make improvements as necessary.

Social media listening tip: 2. Provide support

When customers want help with product and service issues, they may reach out via comments, mentions, or direct messages (DMs). But in some cases, customers may use social media to vent about your brand—without mentioning your company directly.

Social listening identifies public conversations with certain keywords, so you can easily find more under-the-radar rants. Then you can reach out with a resolution and have a chance to recover a customer.

Social media listening tip: 3. Curtail crises

If you’re lucky, problems with your products or services will affect only a handful of customers. But in some cases, a bigger issue could lead to a spike in negative sentiment or a full-blown social media crisis .

Social listening can help you identify and address problems before they generate a lasting effect. Because you can track individual conversations and monitor volume, you can respond to major issues efficiently, without compromising your brand.

Social media listening tip: 4. Monitor campaigns

Whether you’re running marketing campaign s or hosting events, you need a way to monitor what’s happening. You may also want to join the conversation, so you can capture leads and drive business.

With social listening, you can track keywords across social media channels in real time. That means you can help your initiatives succeed and maximize the value that both you and your participants extract.

Social media listening tip: 5. Identify opportunities

From paid social to search engine optimization (SEO), your organization may use a wide variety of customer acquisition techniques. In many cases, you can add social listening to the list of options.

If you add the right keywords and hashtags to your social listening routine, you can find people looking for the solutions you sell. By responding to their social media posts, you can boost brand awareness, generate leads, and even win sales.

Social media listening tip: 6. Research competitors

Social listening lets you process virtually any public social media content . That means this technique can help you discover conversations on almost any topic. That makes it ideal for competitive research, too.

When you use social listening for competitive research, you can assess customer sentiment. You can also identify common customer issues your competitors are experiencing. Then you can use your insights to inform your marketing efforts, positioning, and support.

Social media listening tip: 7. Know your industry

Social listening is also ideal for monitoring industry trends and identifying popular topics of conversation. You can use social listening tools to track industry-specific keywords, phrases, and figures so you can stay on top of what’s happening.

Then you can use what you’ve learned to create thought leadership and offer informed opinions. You can also create better content for your digital marketing.

How Do You Do Social Listening?

With the right social media monitoring tools and a simple workflow, you can master social listening. From choosing a tool to gaining insights on social data, here’s how to do social listening successfully.

1. Decide on a social listening tool

With a social listening tool, you can automate keyword and hashtag searches. Many tools also provide reporting and dashboards to help you process data efficiently.

As a complete social media solution, Agorapulse has a built-in social listening tool. With this powerful tool, you can listen on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube—allowing you to tune in to key conversations across social media channels.

You can set up custom listening searches on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Rely on Agorapulse to streamline everything from market research to competitive research.

Agorapulse automatically identifies all public brand mentions on all supported profiles. So, you can depend on Agorapulse for customer support and reputation management.

In addition, Agorapulse helps you understand how trends pan out over time. With the integrated reporting tools and social media analytics, you can monitor conversation volume and assess how key topics affect your brand’s visibility.

A leading consumer intelligence platform, Brandwatch specializes in social listening. This dedicated tool supports a range of social media and channels, forums, and websites so it can track trends and conversations across digital spaces.

Brandwatch uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze trends, evaluate images, and classify sentiment efficiently. That way you can get answers quickly—and you can manage your brand, avoid crises, and evaluate competitors before you’ve missed a key moment.

Another top consumer intelligence platform, Talkwalker is designed to find and process the countless signals your target market sends out. With this social listening tool, you can monitor important topics on multiple channels simultaneously. That way you can develop a more accurate understanding of your customer base—and identify shifts as they happen.

Its AI-powered technology can analyze text and images. Users can keep track of what their audience is saying and how they’re feeling at any time. You can also use this listening tool for competitive and market research. This tool can help you grow your business and stay at the top of your field—despite changes in your industry.

2. Set up searches for handles and keywords

Once you’ve chosen a tool, you can start automating social listening searches and creating dashboards. To set up a social listening search in Agorapulse, open your social profile settings and select the profile that you want to configure.

Click to create a new search and give it a name to simplify tracking and reporting. Then enter all the keywords you want to include in the search.

Note that Agorapulse supports different search parameters for each platform. For example, Instagram allows hashtag searches, and Twitter allows custom searches for handles, keywords, and phrases.

You can also set Twitter listening searches to ignore select words, phrases, or handles. This option helps keep listening efforts on track and eliminates irrelevant content. If you need more focused results, you can always add terms to ignore later.

Agorapulse also allows you to incorporate select searches into your brand awareness score. You can also add users who appear in select searches to your Fans & Followers dashboard. That option is helpful for branded searches, as it can help you keep tabs on people who are talking about your business.

3. Respond to mentions and join conversations

Agorapulse automatically adds direct mentions to your listening tab. Once you’ve created custom social listening searches, you’ll find all the results in your inbox, separated by social profile.

To process results from one search at a time, open the Filters menu and select the search you want to view.

Then click on individual items to read and join the conversation. You can reply to listening items from select channels (Twitter) directly in Agorapulse. When the API doesn’t allow for direct responses in Agorapulse, you can click to view the post on the original channel.

In some cases, it may make more sense for a team member to reply to a social listening item. You can click to assign any listening content to a team member or bookmark it for future follow-up.

You can also add custom labels to listening items so you can refer back to them later. For example, you may want to save items that appear particularly helpful for market research. You can retrieve labeled items later by using the built-in filters.

In addition to monitoring conversations, Agorapulse also lets you track relevant users when the API allows.

For example, you can monitor brand mentions and direct interactions with Facebook users from the listening tab. If a user mentions your brand regularly, you can track sentiment over time and add internal notes about your interactions.

4. Process your social listening results

To see insights from your social listening searches, go to the Reports tab and select a social profile.

Agorapulse automatically tracks the number of listening items generated each day. That way, you can identify patterns and determine whether conversations are becoming louder over time or if other circumstances are causing spikes.

You can also see how certain hashtags and select other topics have affected your brand awareness. The dashboard automatically compares your brand awareness score to the prior period so you can see if this metric is growing steadily.

You can even use inbox labels for Agorapulse reports to track sentiment. So, you can understand if conversations are trending in a positive or negative direction. You always have the option to manually apply labels to social listening items.

To save time, you can set them to apply automatically instead.

Open the settings for the social profile in question and select Inbox Assistant. Click to create a new moderation rule and input the keywords that align with the various sentiments you want to track. For example, terms like “thank you” and “excellent” often signal a positive sentiment.

Once you’ve set up automated rules or applied labels manually, you can track sentiment in the Label Distribution section of your report. This label report incorporates listening and inbox items to give you a complete overview of how people feel about your brand.

Finally, work with your team to use social listening insights effectively.

For example, if you’ve found that customer sentiment has shifted in a negative direction, it may be time to identify and address the root causes. Or if you’ve found that the majority of your brand mentions relate to customer service inquiries, you may want to explore dedicated support channels.

Three Examples of Social Media Listening Case Studies

Now that you know more about social listening’s value, check out how established brands do it.

Take a look at three social media listening case studies and get motivated to jump right in.

Social media listening case studies: Tylenol

For decades, Tylenol products have provided people with much-needed pain relief. But over time, the types of conditions that require Tylenol have evolved.

Tylenol did social listening to learn the causes and the trends surrounding conditions that Tylenol can alleviate. Those findings help gude the company’s marketing strategy and grow the business.

While social listening, the company made an important discovery. People with hobbies requiring intense, sustained focus were increasingly reporting migraine symptoms. In many cases, knitters drove the conversation, stating that their hobby led to eye strain and migraines.

Using these insights, Tylenol adjusted its marketing and SEO strategy to incorporate this target group. The company created content designed for knitters and focus-heavy hobbies. It then reported increased website traffic.

Social media listening case studies: Fitbit

As a much newer company in the rapidly growing wearable technology space, Fitbit relies on social media for everything from customer complaints to feature requests. The company uses social listening to monitor customer sentiment and guide product development.

As director of community Allison Leahy states, “Customer experience is really paramount to everything we do here.”

To provide customer care, Fitbit monitors social media channels closely. The company aims to respond to customer questions and complaints quickly, with the goal of creating delight and inspiring loyalty.

With a comprehensive social listening approach, the company can also identify emerging problems and gather data to improve troubleshooting. Then the organization provides insights to product teams to consider for future releases.

For example, Fitbit’s Reminders to Move feature was inspired by customer requests. At regular intervals, this feature generates a notification reminding users to be active, helping them accumulate more steps throughout the day.

Social media listening case studies: Southwest Airlines

As one of the top three busiest airlines in the United States, Southwest Airlines easily receives thousands of social media mentions on a typical day. From questions about flights and products to complaints about delays and ticketing issues, the company has to process a wide range of customer interactions.

To manage all this data, Southwest has designated a Listening Center for social listening. Here, team members monitor real-time mentions using a color-coded system differentiating positive and negative posts and tweets.

Since the social listening team is tasked with providing customer support, team members aim to address negative mentions as efficiently as possible. In fact, Southwest has set a goal to respond to any inquiry in just 15 minutes.

To build relationships with customers, Southwest relies on brand monitoring tools that track past interactions. That way, team members know right away whether social media users have engaged with the brand before. That way they can use prior context to guide future conversations.

Social Media Listening: What We Learned

Because social listening can reveal critical information about your brand, the competition, and your industry, it’s an essential process for social media marketers to master.

Those social media listening case studies demonstrate just how valuable this technique can be. May they offer inspiration for setting up a workflow that fits your team’s needs and budget.

Get started on honing your social media listening skills! Check out our free trial of Agorapulse  to help you schedule, track, and measure all your social media efforts.

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The Ultimate Social Listening Guide - Never Miss a Social Mention

Philippa Dods

Mar 15, 2023

20 min. read

Every day billions of conversations take place on social media: tweets, posts, comments, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and much more. 

Whatever business you’re in, it’s almost certain that many of those discussions will be relevant to you. People talking about your brand , competitors, the industry you work in, the problems you could help them with, and many other topics that could provide valuable insights for your organization.

But how do you find and make sense of those insights, when they’re buried under a rapidly growing mountain of social media data? 

This is what social listening tools and social media monitoring tools are for. They search social media for you and sift through those huge volumes of social data to extract just the pieces that are relevant to you, by searching for specific words and phrases, such as your brand name.

This produces a smaller, more manageable dataset made up only of the social media content that is specifically relevant to you, which can then be analyzed to provide useful insights.

And this isn't only relevant for social media marketing . Any company can benefit from a social listening strategy, as it will help you to better understand your potential customers and create data-driven marketing campaigns that will align with your business goals.

Table of Contents

Making Sense of Social Media Data

What is social listening.

With the Right Social Media Listening Tool, Companies Can:

Why Use Social Media Listening Tools?

What are the Benefits of Social Media Listening?

What types of data can be measured through social listening, the different ways of using social listening, using social media reporting effectively, how to start your social listening project.

In a typical day on social media 1.4 billion people log on to Facebook , 500 million Tweets are sent, and 95 million photos are shared on Instagram.

Social media listening platforms give people the power to easily explore all of this data to find meaningful information that can help them make better-informed business decisions.

Social media listening tools enable companies to identify hidden trends and patterns (via trend detection , trend forecasting , and trendspotting ) amongst those billions of online conversations, spotting risks and opportunities that might otherwise pass them by.

This article will cover the basics of social listening and how you can use it to benefit your business and brand.

Social listening is also known as social media listening or social media monitoring . It refers to the activity of discovering and analyzing content published on social media platforms , usually by focusing on a specific search term such as a brand name.

Current social listening platforms aggregate data from a wide range of sources, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Pinterest, blogs, discussion forums, and consumer reviews sites. With AI voice recognition technology, they can even scan the content of podcasts.

If you're looking for some podcasts to inspire you, take a look at the best financial podcasts , the best PR podcasts , the best retail podcasts , the best social media podcasts , the best SEO podcasts , the best Shopify podcasts , the best eCommerce podcasts , the top branding podcasts , and the best tech podcasts out there.

Tip: With social listening, you can easily find out about important social media statistics and make use of specific social media analytics like...

• YouTube Stats
• Twitter Stats
• Twitter Analytics ( Twitter Impressions & Reach )
• YouTube Statistics
• Instagram Statistics
• Instagram Analytics ( Twitter Impressions & Reach )
• Instagram Trends

With social listening data, you can also dig down regionally. You can for example find social media statistics for Australia , social media statistics for the Philippines , social media statistics for Hong Kong , social media statistics for Singapore , social media statistics for Indonesia , social media statistics for Malaysia , UK social media statistics , social media statistics for Sweden , South African social media statistics or UAE social media statistics .

Social media can be broadly defined as any kind of media that makes it easy for members of the public to create and share content online, without specialist skills or equipment. A Social listening tool like Meltwater , therefore, is always seeking to add data sources from new platforms as they grow in popularity.

Businesses typically use social media to gain a deeper understanding of how consumers feel about their brands and products . But they can also learn a lot of other things, like what people think about their competitors , what gaps there might be in the market for new products, and what rising social media trends could change their industry.

Simply fill out the form at the end of this blog.

With the Right Social Media Listening Tool, Companies Can: 

• Oversee their brand reputation
• Feed automated Social Walls for events, websites, or their intranet
• Fight fake news on social media
• Uncover competitive intelligence
• Analyze, predict, and detect trends (e.g. marketing trends , social media trends , or Instagram trends )
• Identify consumer insights

Thanks to increased computational horsepower, it’s now possible for social listening platforms to ingest data in near real-time . That means when something is posted on Twitter, that content is available for analysis within the listening platform almost immediately afterward.

The results of users’ search queries are presented to them in a number of different ways, depending on their requirements: 

• Social media reports – these can be automatically produced at regular intervals and distributed via email from the platform, usually in PDF format, containing all of the required metrics. Tip: You can use the Meltwater Social Media Analytics Feature or other social media analytics tools to automate your reporting process, take a look at our Complete Guide to Social Media Reporting , or download our Ultimate Guide to Social Media Reporting for free .
• Social media dashboards – provide a live view of your metrics using interactive widgets that enable you to explore the data from different perspectives, narrowing down or broadening searches, to uncover patterns and trends. 
• Real-time Alerting – when you just want to know if something important happens, like if there’s a sudden spike in brand mentions or a swing in sentiment, which could indicate a potential crisis that requires immediate action. 

Why Use Social Media Listening Tools ?

A lot of companies already use common ways of keeping an eye on their reputation — be it in the form of print monitoring , broadcast monitoring , measuring media coverage , or in the form of creating media analysis reports . So why not use tools for social listening in the same sense?

Social media use continues to grow year over year, even among the more mature platforms. In fact, since the pandemic of 2020, research found that people began spending even more time on social media, an unsurprising consequence of being in lockdown with limited opportunities to socialize in person. COVID-19 has also changed the future of marketing in that sense.

Social media is never static, it’s constantly growing and evolving. But one thing that doesn’t change is that when people use these platforms to create, share, and consume content, they leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs. That record of their online behavior is what we call social data .

--> Here you can read more about why Social Listening is important at all levels of business. Also, take a look at the best social listening tools and the best social media monitoring tools on the market.

Social Listening Case Study – Pride in London

Pride in London  use Meltwater’s social media listening tool to make sense of conversations taking place online. Stephen Ward, Deputy Chair and Communications Director at Pride in London discusses the value of social listening.

Social listening helps us better understand whether key messages are resonating or becoming lost in the noise. We measure messages using volume and sentiment metrics. Looking at the tonality of conversations is particularly helpful in ensuring we continue to be objective with regard to the success of our campaigns.

Pride also use Meltwater to track their community growth and ROI. Their tremendous growth, both online and offline, is clearly reflected in the numbers.

In 2013-2014 Pride grew by 135%, from 2014-2015 growth peaked to 215% and indications suggest 2016’s community growth will follow the same trend. I attribute such positive growth to authentic engagement- reflecting community views in our messaging and bringing them to a wider audience through fully integrated and interactive campaigns. Says Stephen Ward, Deputy Chair and Communications Director at Pride in London.

Social data includes the actual content of people’s posts and comments, and also their likes, shares, and other engagements. Almost everything that happens in social media creates social data, which can all be analyzed in a social listening platform like Meltwater's .

Social Insights and Social Media Analytics

When people talk about social listening, they use the word “ insights ” a lot, but what does it actually mean? It’s quite an ambiguous term, but in the context of social media analytics , it typically refers to valuable information discovered through analyzing social data. Generally speaking, this is information that has hitherto gone unnoticed, and probably would not have been easily identified through any other means. 

Insights from social analytics could be discovered as a result of a deliberate and methodical analysis with the purpose of solving a specific problem, or they can simply be found by luck when examining the data. 

Some examples of social insights could be:

• Comments expressing positive sentiment about your brand or product correlating strongly with a particular demographic.
• Negative sentiment being strongly linked to comments around a specific feature or attribute of your product.
• An increase in people talking about your brand, correlated to a particular time of the month, or coinciding with a regular event.

Tip: Learn more about how sentiment analysis works.

These are basic examples. Somebody who is skilled in the use of social media listening platforms would be able to perform a more sophisticated analysis of the data, to find deeper, less obvious insights.

Social insights are based on observation and analysis of social conversations around a brand or problem and, as we will see, can lead to strategic decision making .

In many respects, social listening has replaced focus groups as a source of market research for brands seeking to understand consumer’s opinions. There are a number of reasons for this: 

• Social listening makes it possible to listen to a much wider and more diverse audience – it enables you to tap into the ideas and opinions of billions of people all around the world.
• It mitigates the problem of response bias commonly found in surveys and interviews because the data comes from people expressing themselves freely on social media. 
• It’s a much quicker and easier option . Focus groups take time and resources to organize, whereas social media listening can be done very quickly, as often as required. 
• Social listening is real-time – it gives you up-to-the-minute data on what people are saying about a topic right now. 
• The process requires less budget , less time , and fewer human resources – only a computer and a social media listening tool are necessary.

Social listening can’t entirely replace market research , but it certainly makes it easier for marketers to get faster answers to a lot of questions. Professional market researchers are highly skilled in constructing research and surveys and analyzing responses, but this expertise comes with a cost overhead. 

This means that businesses now tend to use market research tools and consultancies for specific, large-budget projects where a high degree of certainty is required. Social listening is able to complement such projects and serve as a more accessible everyday source of market intelligence .

form at the bottom of this article

Simply put, quantitative data gets you the numbers to prove the broad general points of your research. Qualitative data , on the other hand, brings you the details and the depth to understand their full implications. The two are complementary and, in order to fully understand data, both are usually needed.

1. Quantitative Data

• The number of social mentions:  the number of times a specific keyword (a product, brand, expression, or hashtag ) is mentioned on social media
• The scope of the social mentions:  the number of Internet users potentially exposed to a message, calculated according to the audience of the people that have shared the message
• The number of engagements:  the number of interactions between users and content

Tip: Check out the most trending hashtags in Australia and the most trending hashtags in South Africa .

Quantitative data can be divided into two categories:

• Descriptive data:  Gives you a trend or key figures, such as the number of new subscribers, engagements, impressions, or clicks.
• Actionable data:  Contextualises this information by deepening the analysis. Answers questions such as; Where do my new subscribers come from? What type of content receives the most engagement? At what time should I post to get the most amount of impressions?

2. Qualitative Data

Qualitative data helps companies to better understand numbers. This is achieved by listening to online exchanges and conversations by consumers, which are undoubtedly full of useful information. If the quantitative data tells us what’s going on, the qualitative data helps us understand  why  this is happening.

There are two primary, or most useful, examples of qualitative data: sentiment analysis and trend analysis .

Sentiment analysis

The development of semantic analysis technologies has made sentiment analysis possible. This lets us know if a keyword, phrase, or name is mostly negative, positive or neutral, and is an extremely useful indicator for assessing the perception of a product, update, company, campaign, or CEO. By identifying peaks and dips in sentiment, we have a much better chance of understanding how audiences feel about a particular topic . It’s also useful in determining high positives – which may be due to an influencer having posted about you – or extreme negatives – which is often the tell-tale sign of a crisis.

Trend analysis

No one has the ability to read through the millions of posts shared every day, but it is possible to automatically analyze correlations between exchanges and extract conversational tendencies. This is perfect for companies wanting to understand the context in which your brand or product is being talked about, and with which themes it is associated.

How is social data recovered?

• On social media networks:  Most of the main social media networks have their own range of statistics and analysis tools, accessible through the users' business profiles. The data they provide can be great to use to understand the performance of your profiles and single posts.
• With social media engagement management tools:  Many social media management tools provide more advanced automated analysis for a more in-depth understanding of the data on social media. For example, Meltwater Engage enables companies to manage all social accounts from one platform and schedule posts to targeted audiences – saving social media managers time and effort – as well as benchmarking against competitors and measuring the impact of media strategies.
• With social media listening tools and social media monitoring tools :  For the most exhaustive analysis possible, it’s best to focus on not only your current community but those interested in your competitors and the wider industry.

Did you know? Salesforce Social Studio will soon be closed down. Learn how to prepare for the Salesforce Social Studio Sunset sunset.

• Reputation : Keep track of all social mentions of your brand and products to understand how your company is being perceived and what topics are surrounding it.
• Crisis Watch/prevention: Anticipate crises and limit the chances of them going full scale by tracking your brand’s sentiment and potentially negative keywords. This allows companies to react as quickly as possible if something comes up.
• Crisis Damage: Measure the scale of crisis damage and the impact of your recovery by benchmarking your brand sentiment in the months before and after a crisis.
• Competitive Intelligence : Analyze the communication, news, and reputation of your competitors. Social media listening can enable you to predict trends, remain up-to-date with industry innovation, and stay ahead of competitors.
• Trend Report: Identify key topics that drive conversations in your market. By understanding the relevant themes your target audience is talking about, you can discover technologies or trends that your company could be pioneers in.
• Lead Generation: Discover exciting new business opportunities by listening for any aspect of your product or business along with “How To” or “Which Tool Do I Choose,” and engage with these consumers and their community.

All of this social data isn't going to be very helpful unless it can be presented to people in a way that's useful to them, and that's what social media reporting is for.

Social media monitoring tools generally enable you to build reports that feature all of the key metrics and KPIs that are important to you and then have them automatically generated and distributed as often as required, whether that's weekly, monthly, or quarterly reports.

Once this functionality is properly configured and running on auto-pilot, it means that all of your stakeholders can receive their regular social media report that contains insights from you social listening efforts, without you needing to waste a lot of time manually pulling the data together and putting it into a presentation-ready format. The social media reporting tool should do all of the heavy lifting for you.

What kind of information should a social media report include?

• Keyword mention trends:  This most fundamental metric shows how frequently your brand (and other important keywords) are being discussed in social media, and whether that's trending up or down over time.
• Sentiment analysis trends : Are positive or negative discussions of your brand increasing or decreasing? This is another key metric that's a great indicator of brand health and can give you an early warning sign of a crisis or opportunity that requires a fast response.
• Related themes:  Tools like word clouds provide an easy-to-understand way of showing the most commonly used words and phrases in discussions relating to your brand in a social media report. They add context to the keyword and sentiment trends, by social reporting the topics that are driving those trends.
• Locations:  Social listening tools can help you understand where in the world people are talking about your brand. So if your social media report shows that there's a sudden unexpected spike of brand mentions in, say, New Zealand, you'll know that there's something interesting happening that needs to be investigated.
• Influencers:  A key element of social media marketing is understanding who are the most influential voices in your market. Social media listening software can identify the people who have the most clout in relevant conversations and include them in your regular social reporting.
• Social Media Channels:   It's important to use brand tracking (aka brand monitoring ) via brand tracking software / brand monitoring tools to know where people are talking about your brand the most. Twitter? Facebook? Blogs? Discussion forums? You can't engage with people if you don't know where they are, so your social media reports should include this information. For more details check out our blog about Facebook monitoring . We also support the unique case of Korean social media and have a list of the top Asian News Channels & Websites to follow .

Follow our step-by-step process to get your company's social listening strategy off the ground!

1. Define your goals

• What do you want to get out of the tool?
• Do you want to know your consumer better?
• Stay ahead of your competition?
• Protect your reputation from a crisis?

2. Determine channels to monitor

Think about your goals and whether they are achievable on the social media channels where your audience hangs out. Any good social listening tool will be able to showcase which channels your audience is communicating on. If, for example, your goal is to drive people to your website, Instagram isn’t the best platform for this as you’re pretty restrictive when it comes to where you can post a link.

3. Choose the right tools

We’ve provided a few tips to help with your search for the perfect social listening tool below:

• Consider the search mode: Searches can become quite complex, so it’s imperative that you filter your searches to only what is most relevant (especially if you are a company with a generic name like Apple ). Get to grips with how the Boolean searches work to really amplify the impact that social media listening can have on your brand.
• Filter in customer service: Some social media listening tools, like Meltwater’s , come with dedicated Account Managers, enabling you to get the most out of the tool – not to mention the fact that Account Managers are especially helpful in times of a crisis, which you never know might hit!

4. Set up alerts

To really stay on top of your game, set up alerts so that you never miss an important social mention of your brand, competitor, or industry. You can choose whether you want to be alerted on all mentions or as soon as a crisis or major trend emerges.

5. Analyze and compare your social media metrics

In a couple of very simple steps, you can create a visually appealing page of insights that can be understood with ease. We call these dashboards . Social media dashboards enable you to see all your most important social media metrics at first glance.

Dashboards are custom-made, so you can be as high-level or granular as you want. This typically depends on the person using the dashboard to make sense of the conversation. For example, your social media manager will be interested in starting a conversation with influencers compared to your CEO who may be interested in seeing social media share of voice. The dashboard can analyze a whole range of metrics including trending themes, media exposure, sentiment analysis, or share of voice.

6. Share your results

Meltwater also offers a branded reporting service which is part of the social analytics you get, using the insights found through social media listening. Similar to the dashboards, the reports are compiled specifically for you and include whichever stats and insights you choose. You can then share your hard work and the results with colleagues, clients, or whichever department the results concern using our Newsletter feature .

Create an action plan : Social media listening is not just about social monitoring, but also about taking action. Some tools provide such thorough analysis and actionable insights that creating a plan of action is quick and easy. In the fast-paced, digitized world we live in, being able to make these kinds of plans and decisions quickly is crucial.

Get Started with the Meltwater Social Listening Suite Today

Want to learn more about social listening, reporting, and engaging with Meltwater? Fill out the form below and contact us today!

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Using social listening to make business decisions: two great case studies

A week ago I attended a Social Listening Roadshow in London, put on by Conversocial and Synthesio , which featured some interesting insights and two case studies – from car company, Nissan, and airline, Aer Lingus. Here’s the low-down…

Firstly, for those that don’t know – Conversocial is a social customer service tool and Synthesio is a social intelligence tool used for social  listening. They’ve partnered up to share best practice.

Chief Strategy Officer at Synthesio, Matt Zito kicked off the roadshow on the topic of social media data. Anyone working in digital marketing today is bombarded with data, but what are we doing with it? This is what Matt called the ‘so what moment. ’ We need to use the insights we get from social media and make it strategic to our business.

If you aren’t convinced of the benefits of social listening, here are a few facts that illustrate the impact social has on the consumer buying decision.

• 93% of marketers use social media for business
• 50% of consumers are more likely to buy a product from a company that they can contact via social media
• 31% of consumers say their decision to buy a product was influences by something they read in a blog
• 56% of consumers who actively use social media to interact with businesses feel a stronger connection to those businesses

These obviously suggest social has a big impact on the buying decision and that social media can be a hub for conversation.

Do you listen to what your consumers are saying?

With this in mind, first up, you need to figure out where people are talking about your brand. It might be where you least expect it, so don’t just check Facebook and Twitter; it could be in blogs or forums too. Using a tool like Synthesio enables you to find out what people are saying about your brand across all channels .  More important than just collecting this data is turning it into real, valuable insights that are relevant to the wider business. The message of this session was: don’t just keep the insights within the social team, tie them back to real business.

Head of Digital for Africa, Middle East and India at Nissan , David Parkinson, then gave an example of when Nissan launched the Datsun in India. Nissan used tools to listen to what people were saying about the car. Nissan found that people liked the size of the boot but didn’t like the interior . They couldn’t change anything on the car, but they knew it was useful information. Nissan took these insights to the marketing team and started to market the boot size – in other words, they used their social insights to power a business decision .

Head of Social Media at Aer Lingus , Paul Buckley gave an example when the airline removed their chicken and stuffing sandwich from their in-flight menu. People were instantly complaining about it on social media (I personally am a big fan of a chicken and stuffing sandwich so I would be tweeting my sorrows too).

After a few days they were still complaining about it.  As a result, Aer Lingus spoke to the production team about bringing it back. Aer Lingus reached out to their customers via social to announce that it was back. Announcing the return of the sandwich via social allowed them to publicly resolve the issue – which is another nice opportunity that social media offers.

Professional Services Director at Conversocial, Chris Venus, then spoke about the importance of customer care on social media, i.e. how moving social data out of the social media team can also impact on your social customer service .

Apparently, 80% of UK consumer conversations with brands currently happen on Twitter and not talking to consumers on social media can lead to a 15% increase in your churn rate.  In short, you expect a response to your social content and ads and customers expect you to reply to them too.

Chris gave five helpful tips on implementing social customer service:

• Select an experienced team with in-depth knowledge of your brand/business to respond on all social channels
• Respond to consumers in a timely fashion
• Report the success of social responses and resolution of a query
• Have department buy-in. How does your social customer service approach resonate with your other colleagues/departments?
• Be aware that the consumer can choose when they interact with a brand, so they are in charge.

It was a really insightful day and, while here at OST Marketing we have a pretty strong handle on social media monitoring tools and processes, I took away lots of pearls of wisdom. Big thanks to Conversocial, Synthesio, Paul from Aer Lingus and David from Nissan for an insightful afternoon.

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Social Listening Case Study

Social listening case study.

For organizations that are considering adopting social listening, a social listening case study is a great way to get inspired and find out how other brands are using social listening platforms to support their business initiatives. A social listening case study can help you develop or refine your own social listening strategy and ensure that you get the full benefits of this powerful technology that global brands are now leveraging to grow their business and stay competitive. With the right tool and an effective strategy, social listening can help you uncover surprising opportunities to evolve your marketing strategy, expand your product line, engage consumers, and lead the market.

Social listening case study summary: Celcom uses Synthesio to support digital transformation

Celcom, a leading telecommunications brand based in Malaysia, was embarking on an extensive digital transformation at their company. They were planning to upgrade their social media and digital strategies and wanted to boost the performance of their digital marketing campaigns and the ROI of their social media marketing initiatives.

According to the social listening case study, Celcom used Synthesio, a robust social listening platform, to collect and analyze mentions of their brand, products, competitors, and industry-related keywords from across social channels. They employed social listening to measure and track brand health, better understand their target audience for ad campaigns, and find and evaluate the impact of influencers. Using Synthesio Beam, they created a social media command center to share real-time metrics and social media insights with internal stakeholders.

Social listening case study summary: Imagination partners with Synthesio to provide insights to clients

Imagination is an innovative marketing agency that specializes in creating experiences. Because of the nature of their work, they found social listening to be critical in showing clients the impact and value of their productions. They used Synthesio’s social media listening software to measure audience engagement with brand experiences, leveraging data on sentiment, share of voice, and share of interactions.

As shown in the social listening case study, Imagination worked with Synthesio to develop their own Connected Experiences Index, which is used to rank brand experiences and demonstrate how social amplification can bring other audiences into an experience even if its members are not physically present. Leveraging social listening data, they were able to prove that deeply engaging experiences foster greater brand loyalty and have a more positive impact on audiences. By sharing social listening insights with their clients, they have solidified their position as thought leaders in the marketing industry.

Social listening case study summary: Paprika leverages Profiler to double client’s marketing ROI

A creative agency that helps brands deliver high-impact campaigns, Paprika used Synthesio’s Social Media Intelligence Suite to assist their client in boosting the ROI of their Black Friday ad campaign. According to the social listening case study, they employed Synthesio’s powerful audience insights tool Profiler to identify their client’s most valuable audience and discover the demographic, psychographic, and other characteristics of their target audience to create more engaging messaging and content. They used anonymous customer data to build target personas, or profiles of the ideal customer, which helped them develop a more effective targeted campaign and double their client’s ROI. Synthesio enabled them to transform their client’s data into actionable insights that can be used to optimize their marketing campaigns.

Partner with Synthesio to get accurate insights into your brand, customers, and campaigns

Global brands choose Synthesio because it provides them with the robust social listening capabilities and enterprise-scale analytics they need to monitor their brand, their customers, and their competitors across multiple social platforms, regions, and languages. Synthesio supports social listening for over 80 languages and offers broad-reaching social data coverage.

Using Synthesio’s Dashboards for Social Listening, your teams can view and filter real-time mentions of your brand’s name and other specified terms by topic, media type, source, language, location, sentiment, and Synthesio Rank—alongside use-case based social media KPIs. With Synthesio Rank, you can focus on the mentions, sites, and people with the most influence. And leveraging Automated Sentiment Analysis, you can get notified when critical comments or rising negative sentiment is detected, letting your customer care or PR teams act fast to resolve the situation.

DDC Is Owning the Conversation Through Social Intelligence

“DDC partnered with Synthesio to incorporate detailed and comprehensive Social Intelligence into their client campaigns and is now leveraging the full power of social data to shape online results.”

What is a social listening case study?

What are some use cases for social listening, what is social listening and why is it important, share this story, choose your platform, related posts.

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• Beyond likes and shares: Measuring social media’s brand impact

by Denise Langenegger | May 30, 2024 | Public Relations

In an era where likes and shares dominate the social media landscape, it’s easy for businesses to become fixated on these surface-level metrics. However, beneath the facade of popularity lies a more complex reality: The true impact of social media on brand success is multifaceted and often goes beyond mere engagement numbers.

Understanding the genuine impact of social media on brand perception and profitability is paramount for businesses striving for sustainable growth in today’s digital age. 

This article will delve into the limitations of focusing solely on likes and shares, explore critical metrics for measuring brand impact, discuss strategies for building brand reputation and fostering customer loyalty, and provide insights into effectively measuring ROI through real-world case studies.

( Featured Image )

The pitfalls of focusing on likes & shares

Likes and shares are often seen as the holy grail of social media success. However, relying solely on these metrics can be misleading. Sure, many likes might feel good, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Here’s why:

• Limited view of engagement : Likes and shares are one-click actions. They don’t reveal if someone genuinely connected with your content or found it valuable. Did they read the entire post? Did they leave a comment expressing their thoughts? These actions provide a much clearer picture of social media engagement .
• Misleading popularity : It’s easy to inflate likes and shares through paid promotions or fake accounts. This creates a false sense of popularity that doesn’t translate to a real brand connection.

Focusing on these vanity metrics can lead you to the wrong social media strategy path. In the next section, we’ll explore more meaningful metrics that provide a deeper understanding of your brand’s impact on social media.

Critical metrics for brand impact

While likes and shares might seem like a sign of success on social media, according to the 2023 Sprout Social Index , only 38 percent of marketers believe likes and shares accurately reflect brand performance. To gain a more nuanced understanding of how social media impacts your brand, let’s explore two key metrics categories: engagement and conversion metrics.

Engagement metrics

Engagement metrics delve beyond simple reactions to reveal how deeply your audience interacts with your brand. 

• Comments, where followers share their thoughts and opinions, provide valuable insights into brand sentiment. 
• Shares with context, where users add their commentary when sharing your content, indicate genuine interest and a desire to spread your message further. 
• Whether positive or negative, mentions show that your brand sparks conversation and builds brand awareness. 

By focusing on these metrics , you can gauge how effectively your social media strategy resonates with your target audience.

Conversion metrics

Social media isn’t just about likes and comments; it’s also a powerful tool for driving conversions and sales. Conversion metrics track how social media influences the customer journey, from initial brand awareness to consideration and conversion. 

By monitoring website traffic generated from social media posts , leads acquired through social media campaigns, and brand advocacy displayed through social mentions, you can assess the effectiveness of your social media efforts in driving business results and achieving a positive return on investment (ROI).

Listening & responding: Building brand reputation

In today’s digital landscape, social media has become a powerful platform for customer communication. But simply broadcasting messages isn’t enough. You need to listen and respond actively to connect with your audience and build a strong brand reputation. Here’s how social listening can be a game-changer.

Social listening refers to monitoring online conversations about your brand across various social media platforms. According to the 2023 Social Media Industry Report , 80% of customers expect brands to respond to social media messages. By utilizing social listening tools, you can gain valuable insights into what people say about your brand, both positive and negative.

This enables you to identify brand mentions, track sentiment analysis, and promptly address customer concerns. You can build trust and cultivate a positive brand image by actively engaging with your audience, responding to comments and messages, and demonstrating that you value their feedback. 

Social listening lets you participate in conversations, address issues before they escalate, and turn satisfied customers into brand advocates.

For instance, if you’re a hair salon utilizing Fresha’s hair salon booking automation software , which includes customer reviews for listed brands, it’s extremely helpful from a business perspective to track your brand’s reviews. Additionally, one cool thing you can do here is monitor all of your competitors in your target location or city for insights and pay attention to not only what they like but also wanted they don’t like as this will provide your business with ways to improve your business but also it may even give you some idea to create new service offerings.

The power of customer engagement

Liking and sharing posts are a good start, but they don’t tell the whole story. Social media needs to go beyond these basic interactions to build brand loyalty. Here’s where fostering meaningful connections with your followers becomes crucial.

Think of it like this: imagine you’re a startup small business bookkeeping software developer. It’s good to see small business owners like your post about launching a new software version. But wouldn’t it be even better if they commented on how your bookkeeping tool has helped them better balance their books?

Or did they share a screenshot of your software interface showcasing a specific feature they love and how it saved them time managing their finances? This deeper level of engagement shows they’re not just passively consuming your content but actively using and benefiting from your product.

This deeper level of engagement shows a genuine interest in your brand and creates a stronger connection.

There are many ways to encourage this kind of active participation, such as: 

• Running contests or polls can spark conversations and excite people about your brand. 
• Hosting Q&A sessions allows you to address customer questions and build trust directly. 
• User-generated content (UGC) campaigns, where you encourage followers to share their photos or experiences with your products, can be a powerful way to boost brand loyalty and authenticity.

By implementing these strategies, you’re not just collecting likes and shares but fostering a community around your brand. This two-way communication strengthens customer relationships, leading to increased brand loyalty and a more successful social media presence.

Measuring ROI

So, you’ve implemented strategies to boost engagement and build brand loyalty, but how do you know if your social media efforts are truly paying off? This is where measuring ROI becomes crucial.

ROI essentially tells you how much profit you make for every dollar invested. In the context of social media, it helps you understand the return you’re getting on your time, money, and resources spent on these marketing initiatives.

According to a 2023 HubSpot-Brandwatch study, a staggering 89% of businesses indicate that social media marketing positively impacts their ROI. However, simply tracking likes and shares doesn’t provide a clear picture.

To measure ROI effectively, we need to delve deeper into the above-mentioned metrics that are aligned with your business goals.

Case studies

Seeing is believing, and case studies offer powerful proof when it comes to social media impact. Let’s explore how three global brands successfully measured their social media impact beyond likes and shares.

Dove: Championing Body Positivity

Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign is a prime example of social listening driving brand impact. By acknowledging negative body image perceptions through social media campaigns, Dove sparked conversations and built a strong connection with its audience. This significantly increased brand loyalty and sales, proving that social media can be a powerful tool for social good and a positive brand reputation .

Starbucks: Building Community Through Engagement

Starbucks understands the importance of fostering a loyal online community. Through interactive campaigns like their #RedCupContest, Starbucks leveraged social media to encourage user-generated content and brand interactions. This strategy boosted brand awareness and provided valuable customer insights, allowing Starbucks to tailor its offerings and promotions to meet audience preferences better.

Lego: User-Generated Content Fuels Creativity

Lego thrives on user creativity. Their social media strategy encourages fans to share their Lego creations using specific hashtags. This approach entertains its audience, generates valuable free advertising, and strengthens the brand’s connection with its core demographic. By focusing on user engagement and fostering a community of brand advocates, Lego leverages social media to achieve impressive brand impact.

Unlocking social media’s power: Engagement, insights & growth

As social media evolves, businesses must recognize the limitations of focusing solely on likes and shares. By prioritizing meaningful engagement, actively listening to their audience, and measuring ROI, businesses can unlock the full potential of social media as a powerful tool for building brand impact and driving business success. Embracing a data-driven approach will enhance social media strategy and foster long-term brand growth in an increasingly competitive digital landscape.

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Table of content

1. about the client, 2. objective, 3. how uber uses social listening in product development, 4. social listening roi, how uber increased online exposure by 24% with social listening.

We spoke with:

Uber is a prominent and globally recognized transportation network company that has revolutionized the way people move around in cities. By leveraging technology and innovation, Uber has created a user-friendly mobile app that connects riders with drivers, offering a seamless and convenient transportation experience.

With Uber, users have the flexibility to request a ride at any time and from any location, eliminating the need to hail a traditional taxi or rely on public transportation. The app provides real-time information about available drivers nearby, estimated arrival times, and fare estimates, providing transparency and convenience to riders.

With the release of its new app, Uber saw a massive increase in social media buzz. Here's how they used Brand24 to measure the effectiveness of their strategies.

At Uber, we use social listening on a daily basis, which allows us to understand how our users feel about the changes we’re implementing. As soon as we introduce a modification, we know which parts of it are greeted with enthusiasm, and which need more work. We’re happy that the new app was received so well because we’ve put a lot of work into it.

Krzysiek Radoszewski

On November 2, 2016, Uber released their new rider app, which was greeted with enthusiasm by users worldwide. The rollout got people talking and the subsequent increase in online conversations mentioning “Uber” was instantly visible in their project dashboard.

Within 2 days of the rollout, the amount of online discussion about Uber increased by 100% , from approximately 8-9k mentions to 16-22k in just the first three weeks following the initial release.

The volume of discussions around Uber didn’t increase during the next week or so, but remained high for an extended period of time.

Engagement also increased significantly  in the days following the introduction of the new app, reaching a peak between November 7 and November 11. As you can see on the graph below, the  number of likes  (marked in pink)  increased by 90%  in comparison to peaks from the end of October. Similarly, the  number of shares  (marked in green) rocketed following the app rollout - they  increased by 250% in comparison to the end of October.

While many riders expressed their love for the brand new app, Uber was also on the lookout for the not-so-happy ones so they could use their feedback in the future.

Uber keeps an eye on their driver and rider opinions because this allows them to continuously optimize their product.

Thanks to the real-time feedback that Uber collects with social listening, they know which features are frequently requested by their customers. Simultaneously, Uber can also use this feedback to decide which features have been unsuccessful and require further modification.

While working on the new app, we were interested how our users were using the older version, and how they would like to do it in the ideal world. To find out, we used Brand24 social media monitoring - we simply took a look at markets where were present.

Well done. Some good looking #UX updates there pic.twitter.com/l3pyEMcP0E — Jeremy Wight (@JeremyWight) November 2, 2016

Uber  uses data gathered with Brand24 to estimate the effectiveness of their current activities , as well as in making recommendations regarding the future of Uber. These include product development, entering new markets, and new features of the app itself. Once they make a decision to go ahead, Uber uses social media monitoring to discover how their current customer base feels about the change. They also continue to monitor customer satisfaction from using Uber on a regular basis.

@SuperMobility Great changes. All the little changes are fantastic. Nice work. — Brian Stucki (@brianstucki) November 2, 2016

We know we can always count on them, even with the most difficult inquiries, not to mention challenging deadlines. Thanks to their input, working with Brand24 is not only a wise business decision, but a source of great satisfaction.

The global rollout of the new rider app started in early November 2016 and will take several weeks, so Uber will only be able to sum up this particular project in terms of sales growth after it’s been completed. Thanks to social listening, they can estimate social ROI, which, as stated previously, equals:

Growth in discussion volume

Growth in number of likes

Increase in number of shares

Radoszewski states that at Uber, they “see the value of social listening every single day”. Let’s take the uberIceCream campaign organized worldwide as an example.

Thanks to social listening, we were able to satisfy the needs of riders & drivers worldwide, and with a 1-day event, we observed a 24% increase in engagement in social media. The action had a direct influence on our business results, with an 11% increase in new users, and a 7% increase in average number of rides per user.

Nice to see you scrolled all the way down here! Here at Brand24, we really enjoy hearing our customers' success stories. This assures us of the tool's utility and makes us proud that we can help you with whatever you use our tool for.

Maybe you also happen to use Brand24 in your day-to-day work and want to share your case with the world. If so, feel free to write me!

Till the next case study. Toodles!

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Social Listening Monitoring Case Study: How Breadfast Leveraged AIM Insights Tool To Enhance Customer Insights And Brand Reputation

In today’s digital age, businesses need to actively listen and understand customer sentiments to stay competitive and meet customer expectations. This social listening monitoring case study explores how Breadfast, an online one-stop shop for all your household needs, partnered with AIM Technologies and successfully utilized the AIM Insights tool for social listening monitoring. By doing so, Breadfast gained valuable insights, enhanced its brand reputation, and made data-driven decisions to drive its business forward.

Social Listening Monitoring Case Study: Breadfast’s Journey with AIM Insights Tool in Enhancing Customer Insights and Brand Reputation

Overview of  Breadfast

Breadfast is a convenient online platform that caters to all your household needs, offering a diverse range of products from bakeries, groceries, to fresh fruits and vegetables. With Breadfast, you can easily find everything you require in one place, saving you time and effort. Whether you need freshly baked goods, essential groceries, or a selection of nutritious fruits and vegetables, Breadfast has got you covered. It’s the ultimate destination for a seamless and hassle-free shopping experience, ensuring that your household needs are met efficiently and conveniently.

The Need for Social Listening: Understanding Breadfast’s Perspective

In a highly competitive market, understanding customer sentiments and preferences is crucial for businesses like Breadfast. By actively listening to the digital voice of their customers, Breadfast sought to:

• Gain Deeper Insights: Breadfast aimed to uncover valuable insights into customer preferences, needs, and pain points. This understanding would allow them to refine their product offerings, personalize their marketing messages, and enhance the overall customer experience.
• Enhance Brand Reputation: With the rise of social media, brand reputation can be easily influenced by online conversations. Breadfast recognized the importance of monitoring customer feedback and promptly addressing concerns or complaints to maintain a positive brand image and foster customer loyalty.
• Stay Ahead of the Competition: The breakfast delivery market is dynamic and constantly evolving. Breadfast needed to stay ahead of competitors by identifying emerging trends, understanding market dynamics, and adapting its strategies accordingly. Social media listening provided the means to gather real-time market intelligence and make data-driven decisions.

Overview of AIM Technologies

AIM Technologies is a pioneering technology company specializing in social listening and analytics solutions. Their flagship product, AIM Insights, is a robust platform designed to gather, analyze, and extract valuable insights from the vast amount of data generated across social media platforms, forums, blogs, and news articles. AIM Insights empowers businesses to understand customer sentiments, identify emerging trends, and make informed decisions based on data-driven intelligence.

Social Listening Monitoring Case Study: Breadfast and Aim Technologies

Objective: Listening to the Digital Voice

Breadfast set out to achieve the following objectives through its social listening monitoring efforts:

• Gain Deeper Insights: Breadfast aimed to uncover a comprehensive understanding of customer sentiments, needs, and pain points in the digital space. This knowledge would help them refine their product offerings and enhance the overall customer experience.
• Enhance Brand Reputation: By monitoring online conversations in real time, Breadfast sought to promptly respond to customer queries, address complaints, and proactively manage its brand reputation.
• Stay Ahead of the Competition: Breadfast aimed to stay ahead of competitors by identifying emerging trends, understanding market dynamics, and adapting its strategies accordingly.

Methodology: Leveraging the AIM Insights Tool

Breadfast partnered with AIM Technologies and leveraged the AIM Insights tool to address their objectives and overcome challenges. The methodology included:

• Automated Data Collection: AIM Insights streamlined the process by automatically collecting and aggregating data from diverse sources, including social media platforms, forums, blogs, and news articles. This eliminated the need for manual data collection, saving valuable time and resources.
• Advanced Sentiment Analysis: Leveraging sophisticated natural language processing ( NLP ) algorithms, AIM Insights accurately analyzed customer sentiments, providing Breadfast with valuable insights into customer emotions and opinions.
• Real-time Monitoring and Alerts: AIM Insights offered real-time monitoring capabilities, allowing Breadfast to stay on top of customer conversations related to their brand and industry. The tool also provided instant alerts for specific keywords or trends, enabling proactive engagement and timely responses.

Challenges: Navigating the Social Listening Landscape

Breadfast encountered several challenges on its social listening monitoring case study journey:

• Data Overload: The sheer volume of social media data generated daily presented a daunting task for Breadfast to manually analyze and extract meaningful insights.
• Sentiment Analysis: Accurately gauging sentiment across numerous customer conversations at scale proved to be a complex undertaking, requiring advanced natural language processing (NLP) algorithms.
• Real-time Monitoring: Breadfast needed a solution that provided real-time monitoring capabilities to promptly identify emerging trends, respond to customer needs, and stay ahead of the competition.

Solutions: Empowered by AIM Insights

To address the challenges, Breadfast turned to the AIM Insights tool, which provided the following solutions:

• Automated Data Collection: AIM Insights automated the data collection process, eliminating the need for manual effort and enabling Breadfast to handle the vast amount of social media data efficiently.
• Advanced Sentiment Analysis: Leveraging AI-powered sentiment analysis , AIM Insights accurately gauged customer sentiments, allowing Breadfast to understand customer emotions, opinions, and preferences.
• Real-time Monitoring and Alerts: AIM Insights offered real-time monitoring capabilities, enabling Breadfast to track customer conversations in real time and receive instant alerts for specific keywords or trends. This empowered them to promptly respond to customer queries and address emerging issues.

Results: Transforming Insights into Action

By implementing AIM Insights, Breadfast achieved the following results:

• Actionable Insights: Breadfast gained valuable insights into customer preferences, needs, and pain points. Armed with this knowledge, they were able to refine their product offerings, tailor their marketing messages, and improve the overall customer experience.
• Enhanced Reputation Management: The real-time monitoring and alert system provided by AIM Insights empowered Breadfast to promptly address customer issues, preventing potential reputation damage. They could respond to customer complaints, provide timely assistance, and showcase their commitment to customer satisfaction.
• Competitive Advantage: AIM Insights’ comprehensive social listening capabilities gave Breadfast a competitive edge. They could identify emerging trends, stay ahead of competitors, and make data-driven decisions , ensuring they remained at the forefront of the online breakfast delivery market.

Benefits of using AIM Insights tool

The utilization of AIM Insights brought Breadfast numerous benefits:

• Time and Cost Efficiency: Automated data collection and sentiment analysis reduced the time and effort required for manual monitoring, enabling Breadfast to allocate resources more efficiently.
• Deeper Customer Understanding: AIM Insights provided Breadfast with a holistic understanding of customer sentiments, preferences, and behavior. Armed with this knowledge, they could tailor their products and services to better meet customer needs.
• Proactive Customer Engagement: Real-time monitoring and alerts empowered Breadfast to engage with customers promptly. By addressing concerns, resolving issues, and fostering positive brand perception, they could build lasting customer relationships .
• Competitive Intelligence: AIM Insights offered Breadfast valuable market insights, allowing them to monitor competitor activities , identify market gaps, and seize new opportunities for growth and innovation.

Read more about other social media listening case studies:  Social Media Listening Case Study: How Aim Technologies’ Tool Empowered Vodafone Egypt for Business Growth

Breadfast’s successful implementation of AIM Insights demonstrates the power of social listening monitoring in gaining actionable insights, managing brand reputation, and gaining a competitive advantage. By leveraging automated data collection, advanced sentiment analysis, and real-time monitoring capabilities, Breadfast harnessed the digital voice of their customers, enabling them to make informed decisions and deliver exceptional customer experiences in the ever-evolving online delivery market.

To experience the benefits of AIM Insights for your own business, we encourage you to request a demo from AIM Technologies. Discover how social listening can transform your brand’s understanding of customer sentiments, drive strategic decision-making, and elevate your competitive edge.

Q1: What is social listening?

• Social listening refers to the practice of monitoring and analyzing online conversations and social media platforms to gain insights into customer opinions, sentiments, and trends. It helps businesses understand and respond to customer needs, manage brand reputation, and make data-driven decisions.

Q2: Why is social media listening important for businesses?

• Social media listening allows businesses to understand customer sentiments, preferences, and pain points. It helps them refine their products and services, tailor marketing messages, proactively address customer concerns, and stay ahead of the competition by identifying emerging trends and opportunities.

Q3: What is AIM Insights?

• AIM Insights is a powerful social listening and analytics tool developed by AIM Technologies. It automates data collection from various online sources, performs advanced sentiment analysis, and provides real-time monitoring capabilities. AIM Insights empowers businesses to gain valuable insights, enhance brand reputation, and make data-driven decisions.

Q4: How can AIM Insights benefit my business?

• By using AIM Insights, you can efficiently collect and analyze vast amounts of social media data, gain deep insights into customer sentiments and preferences, proactively manage your brand reputation, and stay ahead of competitors. It saves time and resources, enhances customer understanding, and enables proactive customer engagement.

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How to write a social media case study (with template)

Written by by Jenn Chen

Published on  October 10, 2019

Reading time  8 minutes

You’ve got a good number of social media clients under your belt and you feel fairly confident in your own service or product content marketing strategy. To attract new clients, you’ll tell them how you’ve tripled someone else’s engagement rates but how do they know this is true? Enter the case study.

Social media case studies are often used as part of a sales funnel: the potential client sees themselves in the case study and signs up because they want the same or better results. At Sprout, we use this strategy with our own case studies highlighting our customer’s successes.

Writing and publishing case studies is time intensive but straight forward. This guide will walk through how to create a social media case study for your business and highlight some examples.

What is a social media case study?

A case study is basically a long testimonial or review. Case studies commonly highlight what a business has achieved by using a social media service or strategy, and they illustrate how your company’s offerings help clients in a specific situation. Some case studies are written just to examine how a problem was solved or performance was improved from a general perspective. For this guide, we’ll be examining case studies that are focused on highlighting a company’s own products and services.

Case studies come in all content formats: long-form article, downloadable PDF, video and infographic. A single case study can be recycled into different formats as long as the information is still relevant.

At their core, case studies serve to inform a current or potential customer about a real-life scenario where your service or product was applied. There’s often a set date range for the campaign and accompanying, real-life statistics. The idea is to help the reader get a clearer understanding of how to use your product and why it could help.

Broad selling points like “our service will cut down your response time” are nice but a sentence like “After three months of using the software for responses, the company decreased their response time by 52%” works even better. It’s no longer a dream that you’ll help them decrease the response time because you already have with another company.

So now that you understand what a case study is, let’s get started on how to create one that’s effective and will help attract new clients.

How to write a social marketing case study

Writing an effective case study is all about the prep work. You’ve got to get all of the questions and set up ready so you can minimize lots of back and forth between you and the client.

1. Prepare your questions

Depending on how the case study will be presented and how familiar you are with the client to be featured, you may want to send some preliminary questions before the interview. It’s important to not only get permission from the company to use their logo, quotes and graphs but also to make sure they know they’ll be going into a public case study.

Your preliminary questions should cover background information about the company and ask about campaigns they are interested in discussing. Be sure to also identify which of your products and services they used. You can go into the details in the interview.

Once you receive the preliminary answers back, it’s time to prepare your questions for the interview. This is where you’ll get more information about how they used your products and how they contributed to the campaign’s success.

2. Interview

When you conduct your interview, think ahead on how you want it to be done. Whether it’s a phone call, video meeting or in-person meeting, you want to make sure it’s recorded. You can use tools like Google Meet, Zoom or UberConference to host and record calls (with your client’s permission, of course). This ensures that your quotes are accurate and you can play it back in case you miss any information. Tip: test out your recording device and process before the interview. You don’t want to go through the interview only to find out the recording didn’t save.

Ask open-ended questions to invite good quotes. You may need to use follow-up questions if the answers are too vague. Here are some examples.

• Explain how you use (your product or service) in general and for the campaign. Please name specific features.
• Describe how the feature helped your campaign achieve success.
• What were the campaign outcomes?
• What did you learn from the campaign?

Since we’re focused on creating a social media case study in this case, you can dive more deeply into social strategies and tactics too:

• Tell me about your approach to social media. How has it changed over time, if at all? What role does it play for the organization? How do you use it? What are you hoping to achieve?
• Are there specific social channels you prioritize? If so, why?
• How do you make sure your social efforts are reaching the right audience?
• What specific challenges do organizations like yours face when it comes to social?
• How do you measure the ROI of using social ? Are there certain outcomes that prove the value of social for your organization? What metrics are you using to determine how effective social is for you?

As the conversation continues, you can ask more leading questions if you need to to make sure you get quotes that tie these strategic insights directly back to the services, products or strategies your company has delivered to the client to help them achieve success. Here are just a couple of examples.

• Are there specific features that stick out to you as particularly helpful or especially beneficial for you and your objectives?
• How are you using (product/service) to support your social strategy? What’s a typical day like for your team using it?

The above quote was inserted into the Sprout Lake Metroparks case study . It’s an example of identifying a quote from an interview that helps make the impact of the product tangible in a client’s day to day.

At the end of the interview, be sure to thank the company and request relevant assets.

Afterwards, you may want to transcribe the interview to increase the ease of reviewing the material and writing the case study. You can DIY or use a paid service like Rev to speed up this part of the process.

3. Request assets and graphics

This is another important prep step because you want to make sure you get everything you need out of one request and avoid back and forth that takes up both you and your customer’s time. Be very clear on what you need and the file formats you need them in.

Some common assets include:

• Logo in .png format
• Logo guidelines so you know how to use them correctly
• Links to social media posts that were used during the campaign
• Headshots of people you interviewed
• Social media analytics reports. Make sure you name them and provide the requested date range, so that if you’re using a tool like Sprout, clients know which one to export.

4. Write the copy

Now that the information has been collected, it’s time to dissect it all and assemble it. At the end of this guide, we have an example outline template for you to follow. When writing a case study, you want to write to the audience that you’re trying to attract . In this case, it’ll be a potential customer that’s similar to the one you’re highlighting.

Use a mix of sentences and bullet points to attract different kinds of readers. The tone should be uplifting because you’re highlighting a success story. When identifying quotes to use, remove any fillers (“um”) and cut out unnecessary info.

5. Pay attention to formatting

And finally, depending on the content type, enlist the help of a graphic designer to make it look presentable. You may also want to include call-to-action buttons or links inside of your article. If you offer free trials, case studies are a great place to promote them.

Social media case study template

Writing a case study is a lot like writing a story or presenting a research paper (but less dry). This is a general outline to follow but you are welcome to enhance to fit your needs.

Headline Attention-grabbing and effective. Example: “ How Benefit turns cosmetics into connection using Sprout Social ” Summary A few sentences long with a basic overview of the brand’s story. Give the who, what, where, why and how. Which service and/or product did they use? Introduce the company Give background on who you’re highlighting. Include pertinent information like how big their social media team is, information about who you interviewed and how they run their social media. Describe the problem or campaign What were they trying to solve? Why was this a problem for them? What were the goals of the campaign? Present the solution and end results Describe what was done to achieve success. Include relevant social media statistics (graphics are encouraged). Conclusion Wrap it up with a reflection from the company spokesperson. How did they think the campaign went? What would they change to build on this success for the future? How did using the service compare to other services used in a similar situation?

Case studies are essential marketing and sales tools for any business that offer robust services or products. They help the customer reading them to picture their own company using the product in a similar fashion. Like a testimonial, words from the case study’s company carry more weight than sales points from the company.

When creating your first case study, keep in mind that preparation is the key to success. You want to find a company that is more than happy to sing your praises and share details about their social media campaign.

Once you’ve started developing case studies, find out the best ways to promote them alongside all your other content with our free social media content mix tool .

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How to use TikTok for social listening

Liz Gross, founder, and CEO of Campus Sonar, shares her thoughts on one of the newest social networks to gain mass adoption. She believes TikTok is ripe for social listening, and social intelligence professionals must lead the way in developing a methodology for this new data source...

By now you’ve probably heard about TikTok, the short-form video app with more than a billion downloads worldwide and over 500 million active users. Launched in China in 2016, it entered the U.K . and U.S . markets in 2018. Currently it supports 15 languages and users in at least 75 countries. According to Google Trends, interest in TikTok as a search term peaked this summer in both the United States and the U.K., and worldwide in April 2019. As social media becomes more and more fragmented, social intelligence professionals need to expand their sources and methodology—potentially even before some of the enterprise software platforms do. I think it’s time we pay attention to TikTok.

TikTok is for young people

The majority of TikTok’s users are young. In the United States, 60 percent are ages 16-24 and about two-thirds are female. These users have a lot of purchasing power, and TikTok knows it−reportedly spending a billion dollars on marketing last year , particularly on college campuses and at VidCon . Growth among the youngest demographics will only increase with TikTok’s current marketing strategy. If current usage continues (users spend almost an hour each day on the app, and I speak from experience−it’s addictive), this may be the most popular app with high school and college students, and soon young professionals. If you’re conducting social listening using Instagram data, you should also be interested in TikTok. It’s “the Instagram for the mobile video age,” according to TechCrunch .

Opportunities for social listening on TikTok

When it comes to social listening and social intelligence, TikTok is still uncharted territory. There’s no publicly available API, and enterprise social listening tools aren’t scraping TikTok’s data. But TikTok is largely a public network, so where there’s a will there’s a way. Users can create private accounts, but they’re incentivized to keep their content public. Only public content shows up on the For You feed, which is the key to being “TikTok famous ” and a goal for many young users.

Currently, users can search TikToks via the Discover feature. The default search behavior is trending hashtags, similar to Twitter, and the desktop version only supports hashtags. The app supports keyword search and you can find terms in users, videos, and sounds. It appears that keywords mainly query the text description of videos, but early testing I’ve completed indicates that context and potentially comments are also searchable. The app also supports autocomplete searches − a method of intelligence gathering in its own right.

Uses for TikTok social intelligence

Consumers of social intelligence across industries will have many uses for social intelligence from TikTok, particularly influencer marketing and market research.

Identifying influencers on key topics will prove valuable for many brands. Makeup is a hot topic (particularly in cosplay and gender nonconforming applications−both growth verticals), and brands like Estée Lauder are dedicating up to 75 percent of their marketing budgets to digital social media influencers . Brands will find these influencers on TikTok, if they’re not already, and social intelligence supports that. At Campus Sonar , we work mainly with the higher education sector and identified student TikTok influencers in the accessibility/ASL community, audio engineering, and gender queer issues. Other industries where there are likely already opportunities on TikTok include pet care, apparel, food and beverage, and lifestyle.

TikTok also supports qualitative market research opportunities, and I’m particularly interested to see how the app culture evolves. Although a lot of the trending videos are very meme-focused, if you follow “normal people” who have amassed an audience of tens or hundreds of thousands, you’ll see that they spend time talking to the camera about experiences and issues that are important to them. I’ve seen people talk about the diseases they live with, their ongoing development of gender identity, getting over the loss of a loved one, life at school/university, or struggles with employment. There is a considerable amount of untapped market research opportunity to better understand the customer journey for many products and services.

Stepping into the TikTok unknown

There is a lot the social listening industry doesn’t know about TikTok yet, but as innovative insight professionals we need to investigate. I know the Campus Sonar team will dive into TikTok this fall. Working with emerging datasets isn’t easy, and no one has created a manual. But there is immense value in understanding the zeitgeist of consumers, and right now that’s TikTok. The fact that no one is doing this at scale makes it a worthwhile opportunity.

This interview was recorded via LinkedIn Live, if you prefer to view on LinkedIn, click the button below.

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Social Media Surveillance by the U.S. Government

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Social media has become a significant source of information for U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the State Department are among the many federal agencies that routinely monitor social platforms, for purposes ranging from conducting investigations to identifying threats to screening travelers and immigrants. This is not surprising; as the U.S. Supreme Court has  said , social media platforms have become “for many . . . the principal sources for knowing current events, . . . speaking and listening in the modern public square, and otherwise exploring the vast realms of human thought and knowledge” — in other words, an essential means for participating in public life and communicating with others.

At the same time, this growing — and mostly unregulated — use of social media raises a host of civil rights and civil liberties concerns. Because social media can reveal a wealth of personal information — including about political and religious views, personal and professional connections, and health and sexuality — its use by the government is rife with risks for freedom of speech, assembly, and faith, particularly for the Black, Latino, and Muslim communities that are historically targeted by law enforcement and intelligence efforts. These risks are far from theoretical: many agencies have a track record of using these programs to target minority communities and social movements. For all that, there is little evidence that this type of monitoring advances security objectives; agencies rarely measure the usefulness of social media monitoring and DHS’s own pilot programs showed that they were not helpful in identifying threats. Nevertheless, the use of social media for a range of purposes continues to grow.

In this Q&A, we survey the ways in which federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies use social media monitoring and the risks posed by its thinly regulated and growing use in various contexts.

Which federal agencies use social media monitoring?

Many federal agencies use social media, including the  Department of Homeland Security  (DHS),  Federal Bureau of Investigation  (FBI),  Department of State  (State Department),  Drug Enforcement Administration  (DEA),  Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives  (ATF),  U.S. Postal Service  (USPS),  Internal Revenue Service  (IRS),  U.S. Marshals Service , and  Social Security Administration  (SSA). This document focuses primarily on the activities of DHS, FBI, and the State Department, as the agencies that make the most extensive use of social media for monitoring, targeting, and information collection.

Why do federal agencies monitor social media?

Publicly available information shows that federal agencies use social media for four main — and sometimes overlapping — purposes. The examples below are illustrative and do not capture the full spectrum of social media surveillance by federal agencies.

Investigations : Law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI and some components of DHS, use social media monitoring to assist with criminal and civil investigations. Some of these investigations may not even require a showing of criminal activity. For example, FBI agents can open an “assessment” simply on the basis of an “authorized purpose,” such as preventing crime or terrorism, and without a factual basis. During assessments, FBI agents can carry out searches of publicly available online information. Subsequent investigative stages, which require some factual basis, open the door for more invasive surveillance tactics, such as the monitoring and recording of chats, direct messages, and other private online communications in real time.

At DHS, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) — which is part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — is the Department’s “ principal investigative arm .” HSI  asserts  in its training materials that it has the authority to enforce any federal law, and relies on social media when conducting investigations on matters ranging from civil immigration violations to terrorism. ICE agents can look at publicly available social media content for purposes ranging from finding fugitives to gathering evidence in support of investigations to probing “potential criminal activity,” a “threat detection” function discussed below. Agents can also operate undercover online and monitor private online communications, but the circumstances under which they are permitted to do so are not publicly known.

Monitoring to detect threats:  Even without opening an assessment or other investigation, FBI agents can monitor public social media postings. DHS components from ICE to its intelligence arm, the Office of Intelligence & Analysis, also  monitor social media  — including specific individuals — with the goal of identifying potential threats of violence or terrorism. In addition, the FBI and DHS both engage private companies to conduct online monitoring of this type on their behalf. One firm, for example, was  awarded  a  contract  with the FBI in December 2020 to scour social media to proactively identify “national security and public safety-related events” — including various unspecified threats, as well as crimes — which have not yet been reported to law enforcement.

Situational awareness:  Social media  may   provide  an “ear to the ground” to help the federal government coordinate a response to breaking events. For example, a range of DHS components — from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to the National Operations Center (NOC) to the Federal Emergency Management Agency ( FEMA ) — monitor the internet, including by keeping tabs on a broad list of websites and keywords being discussed on social media platforms and tracking information from sources like news services and local government agencies.  Privacy impact assessments  suggest there are few limits on the content that can be reviewed — for instance, the PIAs list a sweeping range of keywords that are monitored (ranging, for example, from “attack,” “public health,” and “power outage,” to “jihad”). The purposes of such monitoring include helping keep the public, private sector, and governmental partners informed about developments during a crisis such as a natural disaster or terrorist attack; identifying people needing help during an emergency; and knowing about “ threats or dangers ” to DHS facilities.

“Situational awareness” and “threat detection” overlap because they both involve broad monitoring of social media, but situational awareness has a wider focus and is generally not intended to monitor or preemptively identify specific people who are thought to pose a threat.

Immigration and travel screening:  Social media is  used to  screen and vet travelers and immigrants coming into the United States and even to monitor them while they live here. People applying for a range of immigration benefits  also undergo  social media checks to verify information in their application and determine whether they pose a security risk.

How can the government’s use of social media harm people?

Government monitoring of social media can work to people’s detriment in at least four ways: (1) wrongly implicating an individual or group in criminal behavior based on their activity on social media; (2) misinterpreting the meaning of social media activity, sometimes with severe consequences; (3) suppressing people’s willingness to talk or connect openly online; and (4) invading individuals’ privacy. These are explained in further detail below.

Assumed criminality:  The government may use information from social media to label an individual or group as a threat, including characterizing  ordinary activity  (like wearing a particular sneaker brand or making common hand signs) or social media connections as evidence of criminal or threatening behavior. This kind of assumption can have high-stakes consequences. For example, the NYPD  wrongly arrested  19-year-old Jelani Henry for attempted murder, after which he was denied bail and jailed for over a year and a half, in large part because prosecutors thought his “likes” and photos on social media proved he was a member of a violent gang. In another  case  of guilt by association, DHS officials barred a Palestinian student arriving to study at Harvard from entering the country based on the content of his friends’ social media posts. The student had neither written nor engaged with the posts, which were critical of the U.S. government. Black, Latino, and Muslim people are especially vulnerable to being falsely labeled threats based on social media activity, given that it is used to inform government decisions that are often already tainted by bias such as  gang determinations  and  travel screening  decisions.

Mistaken judgments:  It can be difficult to accurately interpret online activity, and the repercussions can be severe. In 2020, police in Wichita, Kansas  arrested  a teenager on suspicion of inciting a riot based on a mistaken interpretation of his Snapchat post, in which he was actually denouncing violence. British travelers were interrogated at Los Angeles International Airport and  sent back  to the U.K. due to a border agent’s misinterpretation of a joking tweet. And DHS and the FBI  disseminated  reports to a Maine-area intelligence-sharing hub warning of potential violence at anti-police brutality demonstrations based on fake social media posts by right-wing provocateurs, which were distributed as a warning to local police.

Chilling effects:  People are highly likely to  censor  themselves when they think they are being watched by the government, and this undermines everything from political speech to creativity to other forms of self-expression. The Brennan Center’s  lawsuit  against the State Department and DHS documents how the collection of social media identifiers on visa forms — which are then stored indefinitely and shared across the U.S. government, and sometimes with state, local, and foreign governments — led a number of international filmmakers to stop talking about politics and promoting their work on social media. They self-censored because they were concerned that what they said online would prevent them from getting a U.S. visa or be used to retaliate against them because it could be misinterpreted or reflect controversial viewpoints.

Loss of privacy:  A person’s  social media presence  — their posts, comments, photos, likes, group memberships, and so on — can collectively reveal their ethnicity, political views, religious practices, gender identity, sexual orientation, personality traits, and vices. Further, social media can reveal more about a person than they intend. Platforms’ privacy settings frequently change and can be difficult to navigate, and even when individuals keep information private it can be disclosed through the activity or identity of their connections on social media. DHS at least has recognized this risk, categorizing social media handles as “sensitive personally identifiable information” that could “result in substantial harm, embarrassment, inconvenience, or unfairness to an individual.” Yet the agency has failed to place robust safeguards on social media monitoring.

Who is harmed by social media monitoring?

While all Americans may be harmed by untrammeled social media monitoring, people from historically marginalized communities and those who protest government policies typically bear the brunt of suspicionless surveillance. Social media monitoring is no different.

Echoing the transgressions of the  civil rights era , there  are   myriad   examples  of the FBI and DHS using social media to surveil people speaking out on issues from racial justice to the treatment of immigrants. Both agencies have monitored Black Lives Matter activists. In 2017, the FBI  created  a specious terrorism threat category called “Black Identity Extremism” (BIE), which can be read to include protests against police violence. This category has been used to rationalize  continued   surveillance  of black activists, including monitoring of social media activity. In 2020, DHS’s Office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A)  used  social media and other tools to target and monitor racial justice protestors in Portland, OR, justifying this surveillance by pointing to the threat of vandalism to Confederate monuments. I&A then  disseminated  intelligence reports on journalists reporting on this overreach.

DHS especially has  focused  social media surveillance on immigration activists, including those engaged in  peaceful protests  against the Trump administration’s family separation policy and others  characterized  as “anti-Trump protests.” From 2017 through 2020, ICE  kept tabs  on immigrant rights groups’ social media activity, and in late 2018 and early 2019, CBP and HSI  used   information  gleaned from social media in compiling dossiers and putting out travel alerts on advocates, journalists, and lawyers — including U.S. citizens — whom the government suspected of helping migrants south of the U.S. border.

Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern, and South Asian communities have often been particular targets of the U.S. government’s  discriminatory  travel and immigration screening practices, including social media screening. The State Department’s collection of social media identifiers on visa forms, for instance,  came out  of President Trump’s Muslim ban, while  earlier  social media monitoring and collection programs focused disproportionately on people from predominantly Muslim countries and Arabic speakers.

Is social media surveillance an effective way of getting information about potential threats?

Not particularly. Broad social media monitoring for threat detection purposes untethered from suspicion of wrongdoing generates reams of useless information, crowding out information on — and resources for — real public safety concerns.

Social media conversations are difficult to interpret because they are often highly context-specific and can be riddled with slang, jokes, memes, sarcasm, and references to popular culture; heated rhetoric is also common. Government officials and assessments have repeatedly recognized that this dynamic makes it difficult to distinguish a sliver of genuine threats from the millions of everyday communications that do not warrant law enforcement attention. As the former acting chief of DHS I&A  said , “actual intent to carry out violence can be difficult to discern from the angry, hyperbolic — and constitutionally protected — speech and information commonly found on social media.” Likewise, a 2021  internal review  of DHS’s Office of Intelligence & Analysis noted: “[s]earching for true threats of violence before they happen is a difficult task filled with ambiguity.” The review observed that personnel trying to anticipate future threats ended up collecting information on a “broad range of general threats that did not meet the threshold of intelligence collection” and provided I&A’s law enforcement and intelligence customers with “information of limited value,” including “memes, hyperbole, statements on political organizations and other protected First Amendment speech.” Similar  concerns  cropped up with the DHS’s pilot programs to use social media to vet refugees.

The result is a high volume of false alarms, distracting law enforcement from investigating and preparing for genuine threats: as the FBI bluntly  put it , for example, I&A’s reporting practices resulted in “crap” being sent through one of its threat notification systems.

What rules govern federal agencies’ use of social media?

Some agencies, like the FBI, DHS, State Department and  IRS , have released information on the rules governing their use of social media in certain contexts. Other agencies — such as the ATF, DEA, Postal Service, and Social Security Administration — have not made any information public; what is known about their use of social media has emerged from media coverage, some of which has attracted  congressional   scrutiny . Below we describe some of what is known about the rules governing the use of social media by the FBI, DHS, and State Department.

FBI:  The main document governing the FBI’s social media surveillance practices is its  Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide  (DIOG), last made public in redacted form in 2016. Under the DIOG, FBI agents may review publicly available social media information prior to initiating any form of inquiry. During the lowest-level investigative stage, called an assessment (which requires an “authorized purpose” such as stopping terrorism, but no factual basis), agents may also log public, real-time communications (such as public chat room conversations) and work with informants to gain access to private online spaces, though they may not record private communications in real-time.

Beginning with “preliminary investigations” (which require that there be “information or an allegation” of wrongdoing but not that it be credible), FBI agents may monitor and record private online communications in real-time using informants and may even use false social media identities with the approval of a supervisor. While conducting full investigations (which require a reasonable indication of criminal activity), FBI agents may use all of these methods and can also get probable cause warrants to conduct wiretapping, including to collect private social media  communications .

The DIOG does restrict the FBI from probing social media based  solely  on “an individual’s legal exercise of his or her First Amendment rights,” though such activity can be a substantial motivating factor. It also requires that the collection of online information about First Amendment-protected activity be connected to an “authorized investigative purpose” and be as minimally intrusive as reasonable under the circumstances, although it is not clear how adherence to these standards is evaluated.

DHS:  DHS policies can be pieced together using a combination of legally mandated disclosures — such as privacy impact assessments and data mining reports — and publicly available policy guidelines, though the amount of information available varies. In 2012, DHS published  a   policy  requiring that components collecting personally identifiable information from social media for “operational uses,” such as investigations (but not intelligence functions), implement basic guidelines and training for employees engaged in such uses and ensure compliance with relevant laws and privacy rules. Whether this policy has been holistically implemented for “operational uses” of social media across DHS remains unclear. However, the Brennan Center has obtained a number of templates describing how DHS components use social media, created pursuant to the 2012 policy, through the Freedom of Information Act.

In practice, DHS policies are generally permissive. The examples below illustrate the ways in which various parts of the Department use social media.

• ICE agents monitor social media for purposes ranging from situational awareness and criminal intelligence gathering to support for investigations. In addition to engaging private companies to monitor social media, ICE agents  may collect  public social media data whenever they determine it is “relevant for developing a viable case” and “supports the investigative process.”
• Parts of DHS, including the National Operations Center (NOC) (part of the Office of Operations Coordination and Planning ( OPS )), Federal Emergency Management Agency ( FEMA ), and Customs and Border Protection ( CBP ), use social media monitoring for situational awareness. The goal is generally not to “seek or collect” personally identifiable information. DHS may do so in “in extremis situations,” however, such as when serious harm to a person may be imminent or there is a “credible threat[] to [DHS] facilities or systems.” NOC’s situational awareness operations are not covered by the 2012 policy; other components carrying out situational awareness monitoring must create a but may receive an exception from the broader policy with the approval of DHS’s Chief Privacy Officer.
• DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services ( USCIS ) uses social media to verify the accuracy of materials provided by applicants for immigration benefits (such as applications for refugee status or to become a U.S. citizen) and to identify fraud and threats to public safety. USCIS says it only looks at publicly available information and that it will respect account holders’ privacy settings and refrain from direct dialogue with subjects, though staff may use fictitious accounts in certain cases, including when “overt research would compromise the integrity of an investigation.”
• DHS’s Office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A), as a member of the Intelligence Community, is not covered by the 2012 policy. Instead it operates under a separate set of  guidelines  — pursuant to Executive Order 12,333, issued by the Secretary of Homeland Security and approved by the Attorney General — that govern its management of information collected about U.S. persons, including via social media. The office incorporates social media into the open-source intelligence reports it produces for federal, state, and local law enforcement; these reports provide threat warnings, investigative leads, and referrals. I&A personnel  may  collect and retain social media information on U.S. citizens and green card holders so long as they reasonably believe that doing so supports a national or departmental mission; these missions are broadly defined to include addressing homeland security concerns. And they may disseminate the information further if they believe it would help the recipient with “lawful intelligence, counterterrorism, law enforcement, or other homeland security-related functions.”

State Department.  The Department’s policies covering social media monitoring for visa vetting purposes are not publicly available. However,  public   disclosures  shed some light on the rules consular officers are supposed to follow when vetting visa applicants using social media. For example, consular officers are not supposed to interact with applicants on social media, request their passwords, or try to get around their privacy settings — and if they create an account to view social media information, they “must abide by the contractual rules of that service or platform provider,” such as Facebook’s real name policy. Further, information gleaned from social media must not be used to deny visas based on protected characteristics (i.e., race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, political views, gender or sexual orientation). It is supposed to be used only to confirm an applicant’s identity and visa eligibility under criteria set forth in U.S. law.

Are there constitutional limits on social media surveillance?

Yes. Social media monitoring may violate the First or Fourteenth Amendments. It is well established that public posts receive constitutional protection: as the investigations guide of the Federal Bureau of Investigation recognizes, “[o]nline information, even if publicly available, may still be protected by the First Amendment. Surveillance is clearly unconstitutional when a person is specifically  targeted  for the exercise of constitutional rights protected by the  First Amendment  (speech, expression, association, religious practice) or on the basis of a characteristic protected by the  Fourteenth Amendment  (including race, ethnicity, and religion). Social media monitoring may also violate the First Amendment when it burdens constitutionally protected activity and does not contribute to a legitimate government objective. Our  lawsuit  against the State Department and DHS ( Doc Society v. Blinken ), for instance, challenges the collection, retention, and dissemination of social media identifiers from millions of people — almost none of whom have engaged in any wrongdoing — because the government has not adequately justified the screening program and it imposes a substantial burden on speech for little demonstrated value. The White House office that reviews federal regulations noted the latter point — which a DHS Inspector General  report  and  internal reviews  have also underscored  — when it  rejected , in April 2021, DHS’s proposal to collect social media identifiers on travel and immigration forms.

Additionally, the  Fourth Amendment  protects people from “unreasonable searches and seizures” by the government, including searches of data in which people have a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” Judges have  generally   concluded  that content posted publicly online cannot be reasonably expected to be private, and that police therefore do not need a warrant to view or collect it. Courts are increasingly recognizing, however, that when the government can collect far more information — especially information revealing sensitive or intimate details — at a far lower cost than traditional surveillance, the Fourth Amendment  may protect  that data. The same is true of social media monitoring and the use of powerful social media monitoring tools, even if they are employed to review publicly available information.

Are there statutory limits on social media surveillance?

Yes. Most notably, the  Privacy Act  limits the collection, storage, and sharing of personally identifiable information about U.S. citizens and permanent residents (green card holders), including social media data. It also bars, under most circumstances, maintaining records that describe the exercise of a person’s First Amendment rights. However, the statute contains an exception for such records “within the scope of an authorized law enforcement activity.” Its coverage is limited to databases from which personal information can be retrieved by an individual identifier like a name, social security address, or phone number.

Additionally, federal agencies’ collection of social media handles must be authorized by law and, in some cases, be subject to public notice and comment and justified by a reasoned explanation that accounts for contrary evidence.  Doc Society v. Blinken , for example, alleges that the State Department’s collection of social media identifiers on visa forms violates the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) because it exceeds the Secretary of State’s statutory authority and did not consider that prior social media screening pilot programs had failed to demonstrate efficacy.

Is the government’s use of social media consistent with platform rules?

Not always. Companies do not bar government officials from making accounts and looking at what is happening on their platforms. However, after the ACLU  exposed  in 2016 that third-party social media monitoring companies were pitching their services to California law enforcement agencies as a way to monitor protestors against racial injustice,  Twitter ,  Facebook , and Instagram changed or clarified their rules to prohibit the use of their data for surveillance (though the actual  application  of those rules can be murky).

Additionally, Facebook has a  policy  requiring users identify themselves by their “real names,” with no exception for law enforcement. The FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies permit their agents to use false identities notwithstanding this rule, and there have been documented instances of other law enforcement departments  violating  this policy as well.

How do federal agencies share information collected from social media, and why is it a problem?

Federal agencies may share information they collect from social media across all levels of government and the private sector and will sometimes even disclose data to foreign governments (for instance,  identifiers  on travel and immigration forms). In particular, information is shared domestically with state and local law enforcement, including through fusion centers, which are post-9/11 surveillance and intelligence hubs that were intended to facilitate coordination among federal, state, and local law enforcement and private industry. Such unfettered data sharing magnifies the risks of abusive practices.

Part of the risk stems from the dissemination of data to actors with a documented history of discriminatory surveillance, such as fusion centers. A 2012 bipartisan Senate investigation  concluded  that fusion centers have “yielded little, if any, benefit to federal counterterrorism intelligence efforts,” instead producing reams of low-quality information while labeling Muslim Americans engaging in innocuous activities, such as voter registration, as potential threats. More recently,  fusion centers  have been  caught   monitoring  racial and social justice organizers and protests and  promoting  fake social media posts by right-wing provocateurs as credible intelligence regarding potential violence at anti-police brutality protests. Further, many police departments that get information from social media through fusion centers (or from federal agencies like the FBI and DHS directly) have a  history  of targeting and surveilling minority communities and activists, but lack basic policies that govern their use of social media. Finally, existing agreements  permit  the U.S. government to share social media data — collected from U.S. visa applicants, for example — with repressive foreign governments that are known to retaliate against online critics.

The broad dissemination of social media data amplifies some of the harms of social media monitoring by eliminating context and safeguards. Under some circumstances, a government official who initially reviews and collects information from social media may better understand — from witness interviews, notes of observations from the field, or other material obtained during an investigation, for example — its meaning and relevance than a downstream recipient lacking this background. And any safeguards the initial agency places upon its monitoring and collection — use and retention limitations, data security protocols, etc. — cannot be guaranteed after it disseminates what has been gathered. Once social media is disseminated, the originating agency has little control over how such information is used, how long it is kept, whether it could be misinterpreted, or how it might spur overreach.

Together, these dynamics amplify the harms to free expression and privacy that social media monitoring generates. A qualified and potentially unreliable assessment based on social media that a protest could turn violent or that a particular person poses a threat might easily turn into a justification for policing that protest aggressively or arresting the person, as illustrated by the examples above. Similarly, a person who has applied for a U.S. visa or been investigated by federal authorities, even if they are cleared, is likely to be wary of what they say on social media well into the future if they know that there is no endpoint to potential scrutiny or disclosure of their online activity. Formerly, one branch of DHS I&A had a  practice  of redacting publicly available U.S. person information contained in open-source intelligence reports disseminated to partners because of the “risk of civil rights and liberties issues.” This practice was an apparent justification for removing pre-publication oversight to identify such issues, which implies that DHS recognized that information identifying a person could be used to target them without a legitimate law enforcement reason.

What role do private companies play, and what is the harm in using them?

Both  the   FBI  and  DHS  have reportedly hired private firms to help conduct social media surveillance, including to help identify threats online. This raises concerns around transparency and accountability as well as effectiveness.

Transparency and accountability:  Outsourcing surveillance to private industry obscures how monitoring is being carried out; limited information is available about relationships between the federal government and social media surveillance contractors, and the contractors, unlike the government, are not subject to freedom of information laws. Outsourcing also weakens safeguards because private vendors may not be subject to the same legal or institutional constraints as public agencies.

Efficacy:  The most ambitious tools use artificial intelligence with the goal of making judgments about which threats, calls for violence, or individuals pose the highest risk. But doing so reliably is beyond the capacity of both humans and existing technology, as more than 50 technologists  wrote  in opposing an ICE proposal aimed at predicting whether a given person would commit terrorism or crime. The more rudimentary of these tools look for specific words and then flag posts containing those words. Such flags are overinclusive, and garden-variety content will regularly be  elevated . Consider how the word “extremism,” for instance, could appear in a range of news articles, be  used  in reference to a friend’s strict dietary standards, or arise in connection with discussion about U.S. politics. Even the best Natural Language Processing tools, which attempt to ascertain the meaning of text, are prone to  error , and fare particularly  poorly  on speakers of non-standard English, who may more frequently be from minority communities, as well as speakers of languages other than English. Similar  concerns  apply to mechanisms used to flag images and videos, which generally lack the context necessary to differentiate a scenario in which an image is used for reporting or commentary from one where it is used by a group or person to incite violence.

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Social Media Monitoring & Listening

In a digital media strategy, social media monitoring and listening (SMML) is the strategic process of tracking the information environment and extracting key insights about your social media performance. The authority for public affairs to use publicly available information is found in DoDD 3115.18 .

Monitoring vs. Listening

Social media monitoring is the process of identifying and determining what is being said about a brand, individual or product through different social and online channels. It involves tracking and measuring your command, your commander and your brand mentions, including hashtags. It focuses on individual messages and the mitigation of risk. Monitoring is ongoing, consistent and oftentimes automated. It's used to track what stakeholders and your audience are saying about your organization and relevant issues or crises when they arise.

Social media listening is the process of watching specific social media channels, mentions of your brand, competitors and product to learn more about a specific narrative within the information environment. The goal is to understand the effect of Public Affairs decisions and actions by taking an active and strategic approach to knowing what and where to listen. Listening gives you insight into why people are responding a certain way so you know how to better communicate.

Social media listening is the research and monitoring of narratives within the information environment to understand dynamics that affect PA decisions and actions. By keeping the proverbial "ear to the ground," listening gives you insight into why people are responding a certain way, so you know how to communicate better.

Monitoring and listening are often used synonymously, but there is a distinct difference. Monitoring is about tracking the data that you need to gain insight into your brand, while listening is about analyzing data, verifying or defining your strategy and taking action. Monitoring tells you what is being said, and listening tells you why it is being said. Social media monitoring is reactive, and listening is proactive. The two combined are very powerful tools.

Why Monitor & Listen?

Your overarching social media strategy is guided by the principles of DoDI 5400.17 . Effective social media monitoring and listening can help you to:

• Gather valuable feedback on content performance
• Improve digital communication efforts
• Mitigate risks and crisis
• Keep a pulse on the information environment
• Humanize public affairs actions
• Leverage research for planning campaigns
• Move from being reactive to being proactive
• Know the trends
• Get ahead of a story to develop talking points
• Understand what your audience is talking about and ways to reach them
• Find out where people need help or information

Helpful Tools

There are a variety of tools that can be used to collect and analyze SMML data. Prior to acquiring and implementing a tool, it is critical to establish your SMML process. Most importantly, remember that the tools are just that, tools. A hammer alone won't build your house. There are free and paid options. Some of the more popular options include HootSuite , ZohoSocial , Sprout Social , Meltwater  and AgoraPulse . Carefully research the tool before purchasing to ensure it does everything you expect. Check out G2's list of Best Social Media Monitoring Tools .

Applying RPIE to SMML

Research, planning, implementation and evaluation are the core pieces of the communication planning process. It is built into all military planning processes, and SMML is a perfect application of the RPIE process. 

Explore each RPIE component to learn how to incorporate SMML into your social media strategy or campaign.

SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING & LISTENING

1. Research

Provide the data and analysis for future steps. Use platform analytics and the SMML tools available to you.

Consider the following:

• What are people talking about?
• What’s trending?
• What do you find when you audit a hashtag?
• Did using the hashtag further your reach?
• Who else is using the hashtag?
• What are the primary and secondary keywords?
• Are key stakeholders present?
• Are there any influencers that can be leveraged?
• Who is talking about your brand?
• Where is your brand being mentioned?
• How are people talking about your brand?

Articulate your responses to these questions in a narrative that summarizes your answers. This will help you formulate your objectives, strategy and tactics and drive assessment planning. Additionally, it will help you understand your audience and allow you to target your content and brand to their specific wants and needs.

2. Planning

Make decisions about what you'll post and how you'll reach your audience.

• Identify target audiences
• Who does this problem or opportunity affect?
• Where is the target audience in the information environment?
• Which conversations should you engage with to reach the target audience?
• What hashtags should be used to reach the target audience?
• What did our SMML data tell during research?
• What, when and how will you communicate?
• Where are messages coming from?
• What trends should you worry about?

Articulate your responses to these questions in a narrative that summarizes your answers. This will help define your goals, objectives and strategies. Be sure to think about what you want your post to accomplish.

3. Implementation

Continue the process of monitoring and listening as you send your posts out. Social media provides instantaneous and ongoing data for reach, response and relevance. You have to be able to keep up. 

• How are messages resonating with the audience?
• What is trending?
• What is working?
• Which hashtags penetrate?
• Which hashtags get abandoned?
• What is the real-time discourse?

Articulate your responses to these questions in a narrative that summarizes your answers. Remember that implementation is all about execution. This is where you take your goals, objectives and strategies and put them into action to reach your audience. Make sure you track your milestones and note any implementation issues or crises that arise.

4. evaluation

Decide prior to posting when you'll evaluate. Assess the progress and results of the campaign and process.

• How did the messages resonate?
• Did the discourse cause changes in attitude, actions or behaviors?
• How can this support a holistic assessment with SMML?
• How do you compare to the competition?

Articulate your responses to these questions in a narrative that summarizes your answers. Take time to measure the results of your messaging against your original goals, objectives and strategies and determine if your messaging has accomplished what it set out to do.

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