Do you know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can vastly improve your social listening capabilities?
AI’s implementation across multiple industries is fast becoming the norm these days. This is because it speeds up data analysis and amplifies operational efficiency.
In the marketing sector, AI is integrated into various aspects of brand marketing, including social listening — an important practice to discern how well your brand performs relative to others.
What Is Social Listening?
Every day, consumers produce vast amounts of data on a brand, company or individual that expresses their thoughts, needs, wants and feelings. These numbers will increase further given the role of AI, with the global market value of AI in marketing expected to reach $107.5 billion by 2028.
Compiling and analyzing these inputs is a massive task for social media marketers. They must scan multiple accounts for information that aligns with their metrics and collate it to produce comprehensible insights for marketing campaigns.
Social listening is a way to accurately identify and analyze these conversations in a fraction of a second, improving seamlessness in a brand’s marketing efforts. These tools mine text to refine customer intelligence and grant companies a better grasp of their audience.
Why Is Social Listening Necessary for Brands?
Social listening tools are instrumental for brands to craft more effective marketing campaigns. The benefits include:
- Improved depiction of customer purchase intent: One survey found that 90% of customers would choose products from a brand that provides personalized service. The revolutionary build of these AI systems allows a closer look at how and why people choose a product and where they are in their buyer journey. This helps businesses personalize campaigns to suit different audience segments.
- An avenue for competitor analysis: Learning about a brand is as crucial as learning about competitors. However, compiling this data takes time and compromises productivity. AI tools enable extensive analysis that helps marketers understand a company’s strengths and weaknesses and fill the gap in the market.
- Dynamic building of brand identity: AI social listening tools give valuable perceptions across various metrics, which can guide companies in creating a strong and adaptable identity and empowering better brand awareness among the audience.
- Enhanced crisis management readiness: Social listening can provide early warnings of potential PR crises by detecting negative sentiment or spikes in mentions related to specific issues, allowing brands to respond swiftly and mitigate damage.
- Insightful trend identification: By analysing emerging discussions and topics, social listening tools help brands stay ahead of market trends, enabling them to create timely, relevant, and impactful content.
- Increased customer engagement opportunities: Monitoring conversations about a brand or its industry allows companies to join discussions, answer queries, and build stronger relationships with their audience.
- Measurable ROI on marketing efforts: Social listening tools provide actionable insights that can be tied to measurable outcomes, helping brands refine their strategies and achieve better returns on investment.
The Rise of AI-Powered Social Listening
AI-powered social listening tools are helping to accelerate change in the world of marketing intelligence. These products can enhance precision, efficacy, and data processing methods, giving businesses a clearer view of brand conversations.
The difference between conventional and AI social listening tools is that AI-charged devices can be self-trained to understand and analyze information using natural language processing (NLP). NLP allows for reading between the lines to capture mentions even when the brand name isn’t explicit. AI tools can also understand the emotions and feelings behind the comments, providing companies with advanced information about their customers’ behavior patterns.
In addition, these tools can also leverage predictive analysis to convert historical and real-time inputs to actionable insights and even accurately forecast future spikes and drops in mentions.
AI-powered social listening software has a detailed dashboard that categorizes information by various segments, such as origins, demographics, sentiments, feelings and impact on the brand’s presence. Some also integrate with customer relationship management tools to expand data capabilities across realms.
How Can AI-Powered Social Listening Tools Help Brands?
Besides making marketers’ jobs easier, these cutting-edge tools also allow them to design practical campaigns. This is possible via the enhancement of several aspects, including:
#1 Automation
These tools can process colossal amounts of data promptly, allowing marketers to save time and resources spent doing it themselves. This is a welcoming development, especially given the scarcity of talent nowadays. By 2026, about 500,000 fewer employees will be entering the U.S. workforce. With these AI tools improving automation, employees can focus on more complex and creative tasks, thus enhancing productivity.
#2 Hyperlocalization
AI social listening tools can enable tailored content creation through their ability to yield hyperlocalized observations. These software systems provide information on local demographics, cultural preferences and language needs. Businesses can use this information to create personalized ad campaigns for specific audiences, bridging the gap between creating compelling content for everyone and designing locally targeted campaigns.
#3 Better Access
The integration of AI makes insights more accessible for businesses. Besides captions and comments on social media, AI social listening software can also analyze visuals using image recognition and video using audio recognition features. This expands datasets, opening up a wider avenue for these tools to offer more extensive data conversions.
Examples of AI-Powered Social Listening Tools
So what are some of these AI-powered social listening tools that you can tap on? Let us look at some of the major brands below.
1. Brandwatch
Brandwatch leverages natural language processing (NLP) to analyse customer sentiment, detecting emotions even when brand mentions are subtle. Its AI models track emerging trends and provide predictive insights into customer behaviour. The platform’s advanced dashboards categorise data by demographics and regions, enabling precise audience segmentation.
2. Sprinklr
Sprinklr uses AI to monitor conversations across diverse platforms, from social media to forums. Its predictive analytics forecast customer needs, while sentiment analysis detects potential issues, such as spikes in negative feedback. Sprinklr also integrates with CRM systems, enabling personalised engagement based on real-time insights.
3. Meltwater
Meltwater combines AI with media monitoring to track mentions across traditional and digital platforms. Its AI models analyse sentiment, identify influential voices, and evaluate the performance of keywords and hashtags. These insights help brands refine their messaging and assess campaign impact effectively.
4. Brand24
Brand24’s AI models categorise mentions by sentiment and track influencer impact, making it easier to measure a brand’s reach and reputation. Its algorithms highlight trends in real-time, giving businesses actionable data without the need for manual sorting.
5. Digimind
Digimind’s AI-driven sentiment analysis deciphers the emotions and context behind customer conversations. Predictive modelling helps brands anticipate market trends, while its competitive intelligence tools benchmark performance, offering actionable recommendations based on AI-driven insights.
AI-Powered Social Listening Is the Core of Smart Marketing
AI makes social listening more advanced, comprehensive and dynamic, empowering marketers and businesses to improvise and customize their approaches to create more inclusive campaigns.
Eleanor Hecks is a design and marketing writer and researcher with a particular passion for CX topics. You can find her work as Editor in Chief of Designerly Magazine and as a writer for publications such as Clutch.co, Fast Company and Webdesigner Depot. Connect with her on LinkedIn or X to view her latest work.
