Empowering Your Brand with Flexible Social Media Intelligence Solutions

Over the past few years, you’ve probably seen social media intelligence evolve from being viewed as just an “optional add-on” for market research, or simply equated with social monitoring, into a recognised and respected discipline in its own right. However, while more businesses are discovering its potential, you might feel that your brand isn’t fully tapping into it. Why is that? From our experience and conversations with clients, it often comes down to a lack of understanding of social media intelligence and how to make the most of it.

When thinking about how to best use social media intelligence platforms – whether it’s Brandwatch, Talkwalker or Netbase – you might assume there are only two options: handling it in-house or outsourcing to an agency. But what do these two models actually involve? And how do you decide which one is right for your business?

In-House: Doing It Yourself

In this case, your company’s decision-makers have realised that social media intelligence is a must-have for any forward-thinking business. You’ve done the research, assessed the alternatives and eventually signed up to a social listening platform. So far, so good. There are many options available and, as we’ve covered in previous posts, finding the right platform for your business needs is easier said than done.

Yet this is where some brands go wrong. While handling social media intelligence in-house can be the right solution for some, many businesses make the mistake of assigning the task to a junior member of the research team instead of hiring an analyst with wide experience in social media intelligence. Although the tools offer training and support, these alone are rarely enough to equip an employee with limited exposure to social listening technology with the skills to deliver ground-breaking social insights to answer key business questions. Beyond a shortage of required skills, here are some other common issues you might face with the in-house approach:

• Staff capacity: Do you have enough people? Is your team available to carry out social media intelligence projects, or are they too busy with their primary duties to dedicate the time needed to turn the data into insights?
• Language and cultural understanding: Does your team have the cultural familiarity and linguistic skills to carry out social listening in foreign languages and geographic markets?
• Department ownership: Who exactly ‘owns’ social media listening? Is it PR? Market Research? Are overlapping needs being duplicated by different departments? If these questions are hard to answer, your research efforts may not be reaching their full potential.

Agency Outsourcing: Turning to the Specialists

Another common scenario is that your business recognises the need for external specialists to handle the work. Perhaps you’ve arrived at this conclusion after realising the shortfalls of the DIY approach, or you’ve always believed it’s best left to the experts.

For many, the reasoning behind outsourcing market research, regardless of its type, is because it’s how things have always been done – it’s standard business practice. Relying on an outsourced social listening team to interpret data into actionable insights is often the logical option. After all, it frees up time for your business to focus on its strengths. Yet there are key factors to consider:

• Budget: Is there room in the budget? It can be tempting to pick the cheapest agency, but ask yourself how they can afford to undercut their competitors.
• Expertise: Can the agency relate to your business goals and strategic objectives? Consider whether the agency has the understanding of your product and market needed to conduct the research, accurately interpret results and help drive real business decisions.
• Chemistry and trust: Do you feel comfortable handing over the project to the agency team? Just as you need to communicate your needs and expectations clearly, the agency must be transparent about its ability to deliver the work requested.

The Hybrid Option: Cherry-picking the Best of In-House and Agency Outsourcing

Both approaches have their pros and cons, and making an informed decision can be daunting with all the contradictory information and bold claims circulating online. We get it. The good news is that, thanks to the way Convosphere operates, your company has options beyond the In-House versus Outsourcing dichotomy.

As an agency with years of experience helping businesses across industries with vastly different needs and expectations, we make it our top priority to establish strong relationships with our clients. These are built on trust and clear, mutually agreed definitions of success. While many of our clients prefer to outsource all their social media intelligence activities to us, we’ve noticed a growing desire among some to maintain capability while expanding their internal resources.

This is where the third option comes in. Rather than limiting you to choosing either In-House or Outsourcing, we allow you to cherry-pick the best from both sides. We’d even argue that this hybrid solution can be more beneficial to your company as it not only generates assets but also improves your capabilities and skill set.

How to Realise the Potential of Social Media Intelligence

In these hybrid model cases, we’re not doing everything for you but empowering you to do the work more effectively. It’s not about giving you a fish, but teaching you how to fish. For example, instead of asking us to deliver a complete report, you might seek our support in building queries on your social listening platform of choice, working closely with us. You will then handle the follow-up reporting using the queries and templates we’ve built for you.

One client that uses this method is a renowned beverage company. With a presence in virtually every market worldwide, they run hundreds of local market campaigns simultaneously. To help them more accurately measure the performance of each campaign, we collaborate with their team on two key steps:

• Developing Boolean queries for the global campaign: The client’s team writes the base Boolean queries in English, and Convosphere’s multilingual analyst team localises the queries directly in their social media listening tool, in over 40 languages.
• Developing Boolean queries to measure campaign impact: Working closely with the client, Convosphere’s team builds five standard ‘topic’ queries to measure impact across all campaigns. These queries are flexible enough to uncover unknown-unknowns and are localised for markets around the world to ensure consistency.

Empowering You to Leverage Your Strengths

This hybrid approach focuses on three key areas where our skills, flexibility and attention to your needs can help you take greater control of your social listening and digital research efforts:

• Training: We teach your team how to write and improve Boolean queries to optimise results.
• Programme design: We build a social media intelligence programme, including scoping, template design, queries and execution, with the goal of handing it over to you.
• Staff augmentation: We can temporarily provide team members to fill gaps in your social media intelligence capacity.

In some cases, the aim of this work is to leave behind capabilities and assets – including Boolean queries, search structures and report templates – that will provide value long after our engagement has ended. In other cases, the hybrid approach may form part of a long-term flexible partnership with us, where Convosphere is available for check-ins to help update queries, ensuring they remain relevant as new trends emerge and impact your product space and market.

Get in Touch to Learn More About Our Agile Social Media Intelligence Solutions

If you’d like to learn more about how your brand could benefit from a hybrid approach to social listening, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d be happy to discuss how our flexible team can leverage your strengths, improve ROI and strengthen your social media intelligence efforts.