State of Social Media 2021

Part 1: What Social Analytics Can Teach You About Consumer Behavior

Online conversations across the social media landscape reveal how audiences express themselves differently depending on the channel.

Think about it: Instagrammers are enthusiastic about sharing lifestyle experiences. Reddit users turn to the forum-based platform for their heated opinions. Pinterest is for sharing ideas and inspiration, and Facebook is great for finding deals and new promos.

Using social listening tools to break down how consumers talk on different channels, you can learn incredible insights about them on each channel to help your marketing and brand strategy, as well as find juicy new details about various types of customers.

Here are 3 big lessons we were able to learn:

• Channel bias means consumers tend to be more positive or negative depending on the channel. This proves why you need to analyze channels differently.
  
  
• Some channels appeal to different age groups, underscoring the importance of analyzing which channels your target audiences use most.
  
  
• Social media analysis is about more than just likes and shares. Online conversations offer insights into how consumers think and feel, as well as emotions like love or trust.

Let’s take a look at each of those learnings in more detail:

Understand Which Channel Leads in Positive Conversation

Because each social media channel offers different uses for users, they also each offer analysts different ways to understand the users.

The simplest iteration is looking at the percentage of positive, negative, and neutral sentiment analysis of each social channel. Social listening analysis allows you to filter your search by channel so you can get data about how positive or negative conversations are by channel.

This can help you:

• Know where to target your social marketing messages and campaigns
• Better understand product or service feedback
• Find better insight into where people are talking positively about your brand or products

It makes sense that channels like Instagram and Pinterest are the most positive. They are typically where users share positive experiences and inspirational ideas:

If you want honest feedback about how your new product was received, it might make less sense to analyze these overwhelmingly positive channels and instead look at channels more likely to accumulate a more diverse sentiment.

Dive into the Channels Gen Z, Millennials, and Other Age Groups Use the Most

In case you’ve been living under a rock in the last few years: Millennials and Gen Z are still the most sought-after audiences for brands to get data on. The reason is that these consumers are often viewed as the most unpredictable.

But with social listening, you can derive all types of predictions and insights from the data about Gen Z and Millennials and any other age segment because these social listening analytics are rooted in the conversations real people have online.

Knowing where specific audiences spend their time online is vital. If you’re targeting Gen Z, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to spend money on Facebook advertising. If you want to reach Millennial Moms, you might be surprised to learn that Instagram might be your best bet.

Gen Z’s top social channel? It isn’t TikTok! Who uses Pinterest the most? 

Uncover Top Consumer Emotions and Themes on Pinterest, Reddit & more

You’re probably well-versed (too well-versed?) on analyzing social channels for likes, shares, impressions, clicks, video views and re-tweets. But what these data points don’t tell you is how people are talking online about your brand or topics of importance.

It takes half a second for someone to double tap on Instagram or to save a pin to a Pinboard. But the conversations online are filled with emotions and themes you need to know about.

Consumers express emotions like Love or Anger and themes such as Purchase Intent or Loyalty over the web. How your audiences express themselves on social media platforms will add a new element to your social media strategy or customer research.

With Infegy's social listening platform, you can see how users express themselves differently based on which channel they are talking about. Here is how emotions are expressed on Pinterest as compared to Reddit:

The same goes for themes expressed on different channels. When we analyze all of Twitter and all Facebook posts throughout 2020, we see some stories stand out. The top theme expressed on Twitter is Intent, followed closely by Quality. On Facebook, it’s Promotion that leads the way:

Knowing this, you might use Twitter more to see what people think about the Quality of your products and lean on Facebook to advertise new sales or coupons. However, this will vary depending on who your brand is, so you will want to conduct your own research to see how this plays out for your specific case.

Conclusion:

What more can you learn about the state of social media? 

Here are just a few data points you can find in Infegy Atlas. 

• Sentiment by Social Channel
• Age Distribution by Social Channel
• Active Users vs. Total Users
• Social Listening Data vs. Channel-Provided Data
• Emotion Distribution by Social Channel
• Conversational Themes by Social Channel
•  Sentiment Analysis by Country
• Top Emotions by US States

Request a demo today and start identifying social media listening trends for your clients or brand.