Year in Review: A look back at our favorite social insights of 2019

Welcome to the 2020s! It’s officially the future. 

As we kick off a new year, we’re taking some time to pause and think about our favorite insights from 2019. There’s a lot we accomplished, and a lot of things we’re excited for this year. Our social listening platform is just getting better and better, and that’s something we can hang our hat on in 2020.

For our team at Infegy, this is also a time to look back on the stories we wrote and reports we’ve shared to see which ones created the most impact and resonated the most. Below is a list of our top, most interesting, head-turning social insights from 2019. We’ll cover how we found the insights, why we looked at them, and how they could be applied to your team.

Let’s take a look.

1. Social listening uncovers data to predict future trends

One of the questions we get most often is, “how do we predict the next big thing?”.

For the below analysis, we set out to understand which beauty trend is going to stand out in the future (featured in our Beauty and Cosmetics industry report). 

If you only look at post volume, you are only looking at a snapshot in time. However if you combine year over year growth, with volume and purchase mentions, you can see clear outliers. 

While non-toxic beauty has the lowest amount of mentions, it has the highest purchase conversation and second highest year over year growth. Clean beauty is a standout as well with the highest year over year growth and second highest purchase mentions.

2. Building audience segments by user defined characteristics removes bias in analysis

In our social insights report on health and wellness, we showed how building data-driven audience segments can help you identify and understand specific audience characteristics, helping you discover important audience insights in a noisy online world.

For example, the Wellness Guru consumer segment was built by analyzing people talking about meditation and self-care. The Casual Dieter persona was made by using people who talked about counting calories or talking about specific diet plans. During analysis of each audience segment you can refine that segment but topics, hashtags and themes that appear with base analysis. 

By building each audience segment by their own defined likes, dislikes, beliefs and demographics, you can refine your marketing and product mix to the end user. 

3. Social channel analysis + comparison uncovers differences in conversation themes by channel

Inside our beauty report, we found stark differences by social channels when consumers were talking about beauty. On Twitter, users discuss their daily beauty routines. Meanwhile, Instagram offers analysts insight on brand names and specific products used by both amateur and influencer makeup artists.

If you’re an analyst looking to understand consumer trends in your market, social listening can help you analyze audiences and their online habits, helping you refine your marketing and analytics strategy.

4. Data from sources like Amazon Reviews paired with social data reveals consumer insight that wouldn’t be uncovered elsewhere

For our consumer tech trends report, we knew that there was a plethora of insight found in reviews on Amazon. We wanted to uncover the similarities and/or differences we’d find comparing social data and Amazon review data. 

When we looked at a popular internet of things product, the Philips Hue smart light bulbs, review data and social data offer different insights when analyzed side by side and together. 

In Amazon reviews, consumers are most concerned about the buying and customer service experience. On social, however, consumers mention connecting and troubleshooting their devices. When combined, we found different topics come to the top that shows issues with setting up their smart home. 

5. Brand customer support social channels shows areas of opportunity 

In our social media report on the retail industry, we found intriguing differences in the way online audiences voice their opinions and concerns relating to various customer experiences.

Analyzing customer service social accounts using social listening, we found online-only retailers tend to have more customers talking about their accounts and refunds. Meanwhile primarily brick-and-mortar retailers have more about customer service and stock or inventory.

While traditional brand social channels and conversations about brands can uncover consumer trends, you can’t forget about the other channels you have where customers or customers of your competitors can provide feedback. These channels can give you high level insight like the insight below or can be used to dig deeper into comments for additional trends and insight. 

6. Pinpoint your target audience for analysis and remove noise in analysis

One of the biggest mistakes analysts and strategists often make is basing analysis on assumptions or false information. 

By building accurate audience segments with social listening, you can remove the noise that keeps you from learning how specific groups of consumers think and feel about their experiences.

If you’re a healthcare group seeking to understand how cancer patients feel about their treatment experiences, what the generic population thinks about cancer treatment is irrelevant. In our healthcare and pharmaceutical insights report, we built an audience segment of cancer patients debunk some common held ideas about what these patients might experience.

In this example, we see fatigue is the most mentioned side effect amongst cancer patients. Whereas when we look at conversation about side effects where we don’t target only cancer patients, we see the number one side effect mentioned is hair loss.

This insight highlights the importance of building out accurate audience segments to find true insight. 

7. Product and audience segment analysis uncovers insight for product development and marketing

You can use social listening to learn common use cases and types of people who use your product. 

In CBD Consumer Insights Report, we took a look at various audience segments and compared what CBD products they spoke about the most. Here we uncovered that moms love to talk about CBD bath bombs where as arthritis patients talk more about vapes/lotions. 

Understanding who your audience is and the types of products they like can directly influence key aspects of product development and marketing. 

8. Post level sentiment varies greatly by channel

Before engaging an influencer or making marketing decisions, you need to understand the types of engagement by that channel. 

Instagram is a channel where people share important details about their positive experiences and activities, hobbies and lifestyles, which is a reflection of who they are as people. Twitter is the place to share more controversial posts that will fit in well with the more negative online conversations. 

This analysis is also very important to understand when looking at sentiment towards your brand or product by social channel. 

We’ve touched on our favorite insights above, but we found plenty of insight in 2019.

If you want to review any of these insights or would like to suggest a particular analysis or report for our 2020 schedule we’d love to hear from you!