If you landed on this blog, you might be in the process of looking for answers to one of the following questions: 

• How does my audience perceive my brand? 
• How has my audience’s perception changed overtime? 
• How has my brand been affected as the result of negative (or positive) press? 
• Has perception changed as a result of a new campaign or product launch? 

In order to answer these questions, you will need a powerful social tool that can help you to monitor relevant topics and mentions across social media, and then target those individuals behind the conversation to better understand the impact of your marketing efforts. A couple of tools you may consider using include: 

Social listening platforms allow you to monitor real-time brand mentions and volume of social activity around your brand, good or bad. 

Social audience insight platforms allow you to pinpoint the individuals exposed to and/or engaged with your social content, providing the ability to run highly targeted surveys to measure awareness, perception, or overall sentiment towards your brand following a campaign, product launch, or even negative press pick up. 

So which social data tool is better for your initiative? It depends on your goal and what you’re hoping to achieve. 

When to leverage a social listening platform

When you want to stay ahead of a PR crisis, on top of trends, specific topics and conversations or monitor for brand mentions and social pick up (by influencers or press), a social listening platform is the way to go.

When to leverage a social audience insights platform

When you want to launch a brand lift survey during or following a campaign or negative press, but only want to survey those who engaged or were exposed to the campaign or social content, a social audience insights platform is the best solution. 

Why both social platforms drive best results in tandem

When you combine both platforms you not only get the individual benefits of each mentioned above, but access to even more capabilities and insights. Leveraging a social audience insights platform, build any custom social panel that can be exported to your social listening platform for always on tracking around the audiences that matter to your brand. You can then supplement those insights by targeting that same audience with surveys to gather snapshots in time of their feedback on awareness, perception, and overall brand health.

Additionally, you can continue to monitor key trends and topics within your social listening tools and then build audiences around those topics within a social audience insights platform to better understand their relevance to your brand or any upcoming initiatives.

Ready to start conducting brand lift studies with social audience insights? Let’s chat!

Access more great resources on the differences between social listening and social audience insights platforms for measuring brand lift and audience insights:

What’s the Difference Between Social Listening and Social Audience Insights?
The Next Generation of Brand Lift Studies
The Top Social Media Listening Tools
[White Paper] Next Generation Earned Media Measurement: Moving Beyond Engagement Metrics
[Webinar] Beyond Social Listening: Is 2022 the Year You Build Your Business with Social Audience Insights?