In this blog, we explore:

The Difference Between Social Listening and Social Audience Insights
A Closer Look at a Social Audience Insights Platform
Why a Social Audience Insights Platform is the Best Consumer Insights Tool for Agencies
3 Reasons Why Silhouette™ is The Best Social Audience Insights Tool for Understanding Any Consumer, Brand and Social Audience

According to HubSpot, 73% of marketers said “increased acquisition of customers” is a top social marketing goal of theirs. Having the right data is key to both gaining and retaining customers. The key is having access to a comprehensive consumer insights tool.

Most marketers and agencies are missing a key consumer insights tool that is crucial to better understanding any consumer and brand audience. And that tool is a social audience insights platform.

Continue reading to discover why a social audience insights platform like Silhouette is the best consumer insights tool that will set you apart from your competitors in 2023.

The Difference Between Social Listening and Social Audience Insights

We’re sure you have at least one social listening tool in your martech stack. Social listening tools are great for monitoring trending topics and specific social accounts across social platforms. And they keep a pulse on the conversations happening around a clients’ product, brand and industry.

While monitoring social engagement is key to brand sentiment and content topic ideation, social listening won’t provide key insights into who your audience is and what drives their decisions. To understand any audience and what motivates them, you need access to social audience insights.

The difference between social listening and social audience insights is pretty straight forward. Let’s take a look at their definitions:

• Social Listening: A curation of topics and trends that the public is actively engaging with on social media.
• Social Audience Insights: A holistic view of audience behavior—including self-declared interests, beliefs, and sentiments—across all of the social platforms they frequent.

A Closer Look at a Social Audience Insights Platform

Now that you understand the difference between social listening and social audience insights, let’s dive into what type of insights a social audience insights platform provides.

A best-in-class social audience insights platform will pull self-declared audience data from major social media platforms. It populates key insights about any brand, consumer or social audience in a fully-compliant way.

Below are just some of the insights you can glean about any consumer, brand or social audience:

• Favorite brands
• Favorite tv shows or podcasts
• Media consumption preferences
• Hobbies/activities
• Favorite influencers
• Career profiles
• Key demographics

Why a Social Audience Insights Platform is the Best Consumer Insights Tool for Agencies

Access to what any audience self-declares across their various social profiles is game changing. Imagine showcasing for prospective and current clients how you can accurately do the following:

1. Incorporate unique social & brand insights into your offering
   Build and analyze any custom audience to discover their self-declared interests, brand affinities, preferred media channels, favorite influencers, personality traits, and more.
   
2. Take an audience-first approach to influencer validation
   Move away from vanity metrics and accurately validate influencer partnerships based on who a specific audience already engages with and has an affinity toward.
   
3. Measure the impact of social & influencer campaigns
   Easily identify audiences who were exposed to your campaign and take action on them for brand lift studies or to prove sales impact.
   
4. Take an integrated approach to media planning & execution​​
   Build any brand, competitor, influencer, or consumer audience and target them across their preferred paid, earned, and social channels.

These are the results we see when our agency partners start incorporating social audience insights into their offering:

1. Win key accounts by leveraging rich consumer insights that solve for the brand’s challenge
2. Retain existing business by incorporating new insight and measurement capabilities
3. Prove brand impact and influencer ROI, moving away from common measurement practices
4. Make audience-first, data-driven decisions based on self-declared consumer interests, preferences and affinities.

3 Reasons Why Silhouette is The Best Consumer Insights Tool for Understanding Any Consumer, Brand and Social Audience

We truly believe Silhouette is the best consumer insights tool in the game. Why? It’s the most robust audience insight solution out there.

1. We pull deep user insights across major social platforms (even TikTok!)
   A lot of social insight platforms pull from just Twitter. But most social users frequent more than just Twitter, providing a fraction of the insights you need for a holistic understanding of any audience. We’re proud to offer clients self-declared insights from across:
   
   
   • Twitter
   • YouTube
   • LinkedIn
   • Instagram
   • TikTok
   • Reddit
   • Twitch

2. We are fully compliant, and don’t rely on cookies or device IDs
   Most of our competitors rely on modeled data, AI or Twitter insights alone. Our insights are powered by comprehensive self-declared social audience data. The publicly available data that social users choose to share across platforms. And we are 100% compliant with data regulations and follow GDPR and CCPA methodologies.
   
   
3. We can integrate with your existing datasets and tech stack
   The team at StatSocial understands how essential it is to have connected data and insights. Silhouette can easily create, manage, analyze, and deliver your audience segments to first and third-party systems and datasets.

Want more proof of the power of Silhouette? Check out our blog, 5 Real Examples Of How Social Audience Insights Transformed Marketing Strategies

Ready to start leveraging Silhouette across your client accounts? Let’s chat!