Build Brilliant Reports Using Social Listening (+ Free Templates)

Your task: find insights on your brand, brand’s campaign, customers, competitors, sales projections, or other key measurements using social data, then use that data in reports.

You might already be familiar with how powerful social listening insights can be for your reporting, and that’s definitely a good place to be in. But the great news is, even if you’re experienced with using social listening tools, there are still new and surprising ways you can leverage the data for your team’s success.

In this article, we’ll explain a few ways social listening insights can be applied to your reporting process and how to approach your analysis. Read ahead to learn how to use social listening to improve your reporting.

Our brand new guide, The Ultimate Social Listening Reporting Guide, walks you through everything you need to know about how to use social listening for reports. You get free templates and a crash course on the metrics and learn first-hand how to effectively and authoritatively present these reports for your team’s success. 

Step 1: Provide Data on Who Your Customers and Audiences Are

Think about how impactful your next report could be if you dished on juicy surprises or shattered assumptions in a meaningful way.

Often times, social insights can uncover brand new data about audiences and customers and reveal urgent information for your brand or business to consider

Take a look at this report using demographics data provided by social listening. This example shows how different hard seltzer brands appeal to different groups: 

You see how the brands compare to each other when looking at which groups lead in conversation for each. Perhaps surprisingly, White Claw, which is often marketed more towards women, is more engaged by male voices online.

Social listening puts you in a great position to showcase which brands own which audiences in this way inside your reports.

Let’s say you’re reporting on target customers or audience segments.

Social listening’s deep roster of metrics enables you to construct data-driven social personas, as we did with the beauty report here:

Analysts and strategists will find great use for the audience segmentation capabilities available with social listening tools. These insights will definitely provide a major upgrade to these types of reports.

Step 2: Show How Consumers are Talking About Your Product or Topic

Using social listening data, you can paint a perfect picture of how people and target audiences talk about important topics to your brand or business.

Analyzing how people express themselves and what they say about their experiences is an important step to learning how people think and feel about you, your industry or your products.

For example, comparing how people express sentiment towards certain topics could be highly useful for a competitive analysis.

This is how sentiment comparison could be used to show how consumers feel towards different food delivery apps:

You could use this insight to report on the state of the food delivery app space and explain how consumers express more positivity towards some brands (like Grubhub) and less towards others. Additionally, we looked at positive and negative topics. UberEats doesn’t have the worst sentiment, but it is a popular negative topic. 

Another great way to implement social listening for your reports is to show how consumers talk about topics on different social media channels.

We reported on how people discuss beauty and cosmetics products and routines differently on different channels:

Social listening provides a roadmap to understanding how consumers live their lives and lifestyles and their experiences. 

Leveraging this analysis in your reports will provide powerful insight into those consumer experiences and take your report to the next level. 

Now that we’ve looked at how you can use social listening to report on consumer behavior and experiences, let’s look at how to use the data to more effectively analyze your campaigns.

Step 3: Demonstrate How Well Your Campaign Performs 

One key benefit of implementing social listening into your reports is that you can easily showcase the successes and performance of your campaign with in-depth analysis.

If your role is to present to clients or higher ups how your campaign performed, you can use the intuitive data and insightful metrics available to you within the social listening platform.

We use sentiment analysis as a great but simple way to demonstrate how well campaigns perform. This could be used for events, hashtag campaigns or, as seen in this example, new product launches:

In this example featured in the guide, we showed how sentiment analysis was used to understand the performance of a new product launch and the surrounding campaign-- in this case Crayola’s new shade of blue crayon.

What kinds of insights could you clean just from this analysis? We see how consumers reacted at 68% positive rate to the new product, and then we dug into the positive and negative keywords and topics associated with the product/campaign. Lastly, see how consumers expressed certain emotions related to the product, giving us a holistic view of how well the campaign performed.

There are many other ways to report on how well your next campaign or product launch performed with social listening, which we explored in the guide.

Step 4: Uncover Data to Predict Future Trends

Another key use case for anyone presenting data is to make predictions. If your team uses reliable and actionable insights like that of social listening, you can identify trends and effectively make data-backed predictions.

For example, we used social listening to pinpoint the emerging trend of plant-based food alternatives. We used the the trust emotion to predict how gradually consumers will adopt plant-based meat:

Using this data, you gain an understanding of how people feel towards specific topics, brands or products. From there, you can make future projections about consumer preferences and make inferences about how they will buy.

CONCLUSION

Whether you’re reporting on campaigns, consumer behavior, audiences, industry trends or competitive analysis, social listening offers unique and highly actionable insights to take your reports to the next echelon.

Analysts, strategists, social media managers, marketing managers and brand strategists of all stripes can make use of social listening to build other-worldly reports that provide need-to-know data in a beautiful, easy-to-understand format. Reports with social listening position you to deliver better insights, educate key team members and clients, and prove ROI of your efforts.

Now that you’ve seen how social listening data could be wildly beneficial to your reporting, it’s time to pick up your social listening report guide.