How To Analyze And Measure Consumer Behavior

Using Social Listening To Learn What Customers Are Thinking And Doing

Any brand striving to succeed in a competitive industry must understand how target consumers make buying decisions. In order to truly understand and anticipate consumer purchasing decisions, it’s important to monitor consumer behavior.

The consumer behavior insights provided by social listening allow brand managers and marketers to better understand consumers’ preferences, pain points, and desires in order to more effectively target and capture their attention and purchasing power. The real-time data offered by social listening allows brands to quickly pivot to meet the ever-changing needs of a target audience.

Why Should Brands Monitor Consumer Behavior?

There are three main reasons why it’s vital for brands to monitor consumer behavior.

1. To uncover consumer preferences and trends – Understanding consumer behavior allows your brand to quickly identify and act upon ongoing shifts in consumer preferences. This can help you stay ahead of trends and effectively adapt your products or services to meet evolving consumer demands.
2. To improve marketing effectiveness – Social listening provides your brand managers with insight into what products, services, and messaging strategies resonate with consumers. This gives you an opportunity to better target your leads and develop more successful marketing campaigns.
3. To enhance customer experience and loyalty – Without the benefit of social listening insights, you may miss out on negative shifts in customer sentiment and brand loyalty. In contrast, social listening allows you to quickly identify customer pain points as they arise and make corrections before it’s too late.

What Is The Benefit Of Using Social Listening To Analyze Consumer Behavior?

Social listening is the process of monitoring and analyzing online conversations and trends across social media platforms in order to gain insight into consumer sentiment, behaviors, and emerging trends related to a particular brand or industry. It provides real-time data to guide decision-making, and it allows a brand to quickly respond to changing customer preferences and/or pain points.

Social listening plays an important role in helping brand managers and marketers uncover insights into consumer preferences and behaviors that traditional research methods (such as surveys and focus groups) may miss completely or identify too late to effectively act upon. Plus, it offers these real-time insights for a fraction of the cost of traditional market research methods.

Key Social Listening Metrics And How To Use Them

Social listening platforms, such as Infegy Starscape, provide a wide range of metrics to help brands identify, understand, and respond to online consumer conversations. Let’s take a look at a few of these key metrics and the insights they provide into consumer behavior.

Sentiment

The first key metric is sentiment, or the tone of conversations related to a particular brand (positive, negative, or neutral). Brand sentiment plays a key role in helping brand managers identify and quickly respond to both positive and negative feelings related to a product or service.

To illustrate the power of sentiment, let’s consider how people talk about laptop computers online. Using the power of social listening, we can access particular consumer pain points that may lead to returning a laptop that doesn’t meet consumer needs. These pain points are mainly identified by an uptick in negative consumer sentiment.

For example, we built a Starscape dashboard to collect consumer sentiment data surrounding the HP Elitebook laptop computer, a screenshot of which is provided as Figure 1.

^{Figure 1: Screenshot of HP Elitebook dashboard showcasing HP product sentiment and consumer pain points (2014 through 2024); Infegy custom dataset.}

In the Topic cluster analysis of Figure 1, negative sentiment is indicated in red, orange, and yellow. Notice the negative sentiment surrounding topics such as “battery,” “power,” “boot,” etc. If you were a brand manager with access to social listening insights, you would be able to quickly identify a surge in negative consumer sentiment and take steps to understand and solve the consumer pain points driving this negative sentiment. Here, there are battery issues that are driving negative sentiment.

Risk

The next key metric is Risk. Using social listening to monitor brand risk allows brand managers to quickly identify and respond to potential crises and negative consumer sentiment before they cause irreparable damage to the brand.

^{Figure 2: Screenshot of brands at risk dashboard showcasing brand sentiment (August 7, 2024 through September 7, 2024); Infegy Social Dataset.}

Figure 2 illustrates how Infegy Starscape can help your brand constantly monitor and assess risk. This Brand Risk Dashboard monitors real-time negative sentiment, emotions, themes, and brand vulnerabilities to identify brands at risk. It quickly identifies customer emotions such as fear, disgust, and sadness, to help brands detect and address issues before they escalate into larger crises

We can use the same logic to track negative attributes surrounding your particular brand, which allows you to quickly take steps to mitigate risks before they negatively impact your brand’s performance and/or reputation.

Post Volume And Engagement

Post volume and engagement are additional key metrics that allow us to identify emerging trends and shifts in consumer preferences. Post volume refers to the number of brand mentions, while engagement refers to the frequency of social media likes, comments, and shares. These metrics help us spot emerging trends and shifts in consumer preferences related to product demand and/or shifting sentiment.

We have learned that both positive and negative shifts in post volume and engagement serve as proxies for how consumers are behaving. Increased volume and engagement indicate increased brand attention, either positive or negative.

^{Figure 3: Screenshot of post volume and engagement growth across tropical flavors (July 9, 2021 through June 30, 2024); Infegy Social Dataset.}

Figure 3 offers an example of how post volume and engagements reflect real-world consumer behavior by showing how behaviors are changing around particular flavors.  This growth reflects shifting consumer preferences for more exotic options beyond more traditional tropical flavors like pineapple and coconut.

When we dig into the data, we notice that Gen Z has been the key demographic fueling a rise in discussions around tropical flavors, particularly dragonfruit and guava. This is important insight for brand managers wishing to capitalize on these new flavor opportunities for their products and offerings.

To learn more about the increased interest in these tropical flavors, read our recent insight brief.

^{Figure 4: Screenshot of declining luxury brand engagements (September 2021 through September 2024); Infegy Social Dataset.}

Another example of the importance of monitoring post volume and engagements is illustrated in Figure 4. Our social listening platform revealed a dramatic drop in engagement related to major luxury brands, such as Gucci, Balenciaga, and Burberry. This drop in post volume and engagement coincided with a drop in sales and a lack of luxury brand growth.

Engagement (measured by likes, comments, and shares) is a critical indicator of how captivated a brand’s audience is. The more people engage with a brand, the more interest (either positive or negative) they have in that brand.

Notice in Figure 4 that Balenciaga experienced a 94.7% decrease in engagement over the last three years, which signals serious concerns for its brand appeal. A Balenciaga brand manager would need to better understand the cause behind this lost interest and take steps to more effectively engage with consumers.

To learn more about the declining interest in luxury brands, read our recent insight brief and view an example.

Emotions And Themes

Social listening also allows us to categorize and analyze conversations by grouping specific keywords, topics, and phrases, providing deeper insight into the context and patterns surrounding consumer sentiment and behaviors. There are two main ways we can do this:

1. Emotional analysis – This is similar to tracking consumer sentiment; however, an emotional analysis allows us to access more specific emotional responses such as joy, hate, and love. 
2. Themes-based analysis – A themes-based analysis provides insight into patterns in consumer actions, such as willingness to pay for something or how available a particular product is in a certain market.

Our emotion- and themes-based analyses may result in either positive or negative behavior indicators:

• Positive – Intent to purchase
• Negative – Intent to churn (leave the brand by canceling, returning, or not purchasing again)

Let’s take a look at two examples that highlight how emotions and themes can help us predict consumer behavior.  

Movie Trailers And Positive Emotions

We wanted to better understand how consumers felt about movie launches (and how those feelings translated to revenue). To do so, we conducted an emotional analysis of four movies that launched in the summer of 2024 – Dune, Furiosa, Bob Marley, and Ghostbusters (Figure 5).

^{Figure 5: Anticipation for 2024 upcoming movies (January 2023 through September 2024); Infegy Social Dataset.}

Our analysis focused on Anticipation by scouring social media for phrases such as, “I’m so excited about…” or “I can’t wait for…” Dune 2, one of the largest box office openings in 2024, had a massive anticipation spike when the first trailer dropped on April 27, 2023. This elevated anticipation continued throughout the year until the movie was released on March 1, 2024. On the other hand, Bob Marley had a much smaller anticipation surge upon its first trailer announcement, and the excitement surrounding the film mostly fell flat.

For additional information about this particular emotional analysis, read our recent insights brief.

Mcdonald's Themes And Intent To Churn

^{Figure 6: Screenshot showcasing Infegy’s intent to churn and business risk indicators related to McDonald’s (June 2014 through June 2024); Infegy Social Dataset.}

On the flip side of anticipation and excitement, our emotion- and themes-based analyses can also help us identify consumer intent to churn or leave the brand, either by unsubscribing from a service, returning a product, or vowing never to support the brand again. Intent to churn is an early warning sign of customer dissatisfaction.

Figure 6 illustrates how intent to churn coincides with business risk. We wanted to know how consumers were responding to McDonald’s recent price increases. For our intent to churn analysis, we searched for instances of customers discussing a desire to spend their money elsewhere. For our risk analysis, we looked for negative mentions of the brand.

Notice the corresponding increase in intent to churn and business risk. This shows that consumers are not at all happy with the price increases. It should be a red flag for McDonald’s, indicating that the brand must quickly take action to deal with this pending crisis before it’s too late.

To learn more about this example, read our recent insights brief.

The Benefits Of Using Social Listening To Analyze And Measure Consumer Behavior

The ability to assess, understand, and quickly respond to consumer behavior is crucial for any brand looking to compete in a competitive marketplace. Social listening platforms, such as Infegy Starscape, provide real-time insight into consumer sentiment, behaviors, and trends by scouring social media for relevant online conversations. Using social listening to monitor consumer behavior allows your brand to:

• Uncover changing consumer preferences and trends – Quickly respond to changes in your target customer base and remain ahead of the competition.
• Improve marketing effectiveness – Create tailored strategies that resonate better with specific audience segments, resulting in more successful campaigns.
• Enhance customer experience and loyalty – Quickly identify and address consumer pain points to improve customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty.

To learn more about how Infegy’s social listening platform can help you better understand consumer behavior, request a custom demo.