The Impact of Social Listening in Media and Entertainment Industry

The media and entertainment industry together with social media are the two sides of the same coin; both are interdependent. Can you imagine the scenario where all movies lack the taste that the audience likes or the music don’t relate to you in any way? Nearly 50% of the world population uses social media to get their message across different people, so why not the media and entertainment industry. From social media, you get to know the likes and dislikes of people and target the audience better. But, how do you categorize and draw logical conclusions?

Social listening in media and audience analytics is of special significance where marketers get to know how their people interact over various channels. Here we take an example of Pitch Perfect, the box office hit. It drove online engagement among the female audience. Interestingly before the release, the social media analytics revealed that it was trending among men. This new fact made them change their release strategy that leads to their tremendous success. This is how it transforms the entire scenario and paves the way for great success.

Why does the media and entertainment world need social listening?

In 2019, 90.4% of Millennials, 77.5% of Generation X, and 48.2% of Baby Boomers were active on social media for most of the time. Now, you can understand the potential and leverage to reach out to a large section of society.

Social media is a cheap and effective way to get your brand across a different set of audiences where you don’t need to ask for huge budgets. Also, you don’t have to rely on word of mouth, which is a time-consuming process.

Social media listening has changed the showbiz forever. Nowadays, it forms an integral part of movie marketing as industry personnel tends to look for more in-depth insights. There are several reasons that the media and entertainment industry should look forward to social listening and analytics. Here are some of them listed below:

Difficulty in processing the big data

You would be surprised to know that internet users generate somewhere around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. 1.8 billion monthly users of YouTube, 118 million subscribers of Netflix, and 100 million subscribers of Amazon Prime. These are overwhelming numbers that make us realize the potential of the media industry. If you have ever watched the movies on Amazon prime then, then you will understand what we are talking about.

The monthly subscriptions depict the rising opportunity for the E-Commerce giants to jump in the media industry, and this is what Jeff Bezos actually saw. But, can you imagine the amount of data generated by these social media giants? The numbers can be disturbing if not appropriately managed. The data is generated in complex sets, which are termed as Big Data.

It is essential to turn this unstructured data into useful sets of information to gain insights and draw meaningful conclusions. When it comes to social media, there are tons of data generated from different channels, which can be a big problem if not managed efficiently. To draw out valuable information and gain knowledge, you have to make use of social listening.

Lack of control on social platforms and multiple delivery mechanisms

Lack of control over social media platforms on the part of the media industry has also been an alarming factor.

Today, numerous delivery mechanisms have evolved over the years. People are using a combination of devices and other mechanisms to access the content. As a result, the audience is scattered at different platforms.

This spread of the audience has made it essential to collect, analyze, and deploy operational data for which you will need social media analytics. It will help you to identify loopholes and figure out the root cause, which could be a carrier, a device manufacturer, or an over-the-top service provider. It is essential to know as such because it directly affects the consumers and shapes their content consuming habits.

Apart from this, it will help you ensure better delivery of content without hiccups, which is going to be one of the most significant factors to attract a broad audience.

Inability to deliver personalized (customer-unique) content recommendations

According to a report from Adobe, 77% of the marketers, content personalization is crucial to success. Whether it’s an E-Commerce industry, telecom, or media industry, brands that personalize always win.

Consumers always follow their choices with all their hearts, and when it’s all about consuming media content, they will see what they would like to watch. In case they don’t want anything to put forth, they will simply switch. Hence it is imperative to stay aware of their choices as it is crucial for your success.

To know what your audience likes, social media listening has a crucial role to play. It helps you understand what your audience wants to consume.

Movie franchises like Harry Potter Films are also leveraging social media to reach out to people at large. Moreover, people are finding them more appealing to social media than individual films. They understood the need to personalize and connect with the audience. This way, they amplified their message and remained a long-lasting point of synthesis and contact for fans.

Social Listening to Bring a New Era of Media and Entertainment Industry

The media and entertainment industry is amidst of the rapid digital transformation. Social media has already swept across industries; therefore, the media and entertainment industry is also placing big bets on emerging technologies that will help them monitor conversations so that they engage consumers at large in this interconnected world. Moreover, social listening comes with some extensive features that compel them to implement it in their ecosystem. Here are some of the features; let’s have a look:

Real-Time Social Listening

If you watch Netflix, you might have noticed a change where we have got a “skip intro” button and “Next episode starts in seconds” button.

Now from where do you think Netflix arrived at this decision of adding these two features. It’s social listening where it compiled data from different sources, categorized it, and identified what the audience wants.

When it comes to social listening, social media data is tracked in real-time to test your brand’s loyalty among the audience. Such data could be customers’ feedback, direct mentions, competitors, products, and many more. As the media industry is always in focus both online and offline, following the consumer preference is essential for their success. It helps to identify crisis indicators in the media industry so that you can take the initiative to optimize your content to get better ROI by measuring your company’s impact on consumers.

Delivering Value Added Customer Experience

Entertainment is entirely a matter of choice for customers, and if entertainment providers want to survive, they have to find ways to add value to user content. It is vital to push the right content at the right time for the right people; otherwise, they will be kicked out of the market very soon.

Hence they need to take the assistance of social listening. It provides insights into what customers like and what they dislike. Moreover, it includes information about customer behavior and consumption patterns so that you can now draw conclusions and strategize your content better.

Content Discovery and User Behavior Modeling

As you get critical insights into customer behavior, you can leverage this knowledge into predicting what type of content will be in demand. Collecting data and drawing meaningful conclusions in a daunting task for many marketers, but it has the potential to predict the direction of the market where it is heading.

The essential data gathered through social listening can help in user behavior modeling. Here the media industry can define the lifeline of trending content and work their way to come up with fresh and new ideas that will attract the audience.

Laser Targeted Content Creation to Entertain Consumers

Social listening is not restricted to the track web content; instead, it can be used in the early phases of content creation. After users’ behavior modeling, you can develop more targeted content that is likely to perform best among a particular segment of the audience you are targeting. Here knowing what the audience will prefer the type of actors, their roles, storyline, and directors.

Track User’s Behavior to Share the Best Content Recommendation

Social listening not only provides the history of interactions, and the brand mentions it gives you a deeper understanding of user behavior. This way, the media industry can come up with the most appropriate and desirable content for its users. The users will automatically recommend these entertaining genres to their acquaintance, which will drive better engagement for the media houses.

As a piece of content gets popular among the audience, the media houses get an idea of what people like through the social media interaction that takes place. This way, they craft a beautiful piece of content for their audience on similar lines.

Create User-Centric Ads for Better ROI

Better ad targeting comes with social listening as you get to know from where you are driving engagement.

Whether it is multiple advertising sources, improved click-throughs, conversions, or ROI, customer understanding is crucial. The actions that consumers take across different social media channels help you track their behavior. Moreover, the media houses can craft hyper-targeted ads to improve their user engagement and drive better ROI.

Social Sentiment Analysis

If you don’t know what social sentiment analysis is, it is the analysis of conversations across social media networks. It is to understand the contextual meaning of those interactions at a deeper level.

Source: Twitter

Now when it comes to the applicability to the media and entertainment industry, have you ever seen interactions taking place on YouTube channels? If you have ever witnessed these interactions, then you might have noticed YouTubers asking for content topics from the audience to understand what their audience wants to watch.

Moreover, they come on numerous topics on similar lines as such topics evoke a certain emotion, and this could be the reason that people come to see that channel.

Many brands follow this strategy to understand what triggers the audience. So, they can come up with more improvised versions of content that easily relate to their audience.

Social Listening — KPIs Entertainment and Media Industry Should Track

It is important to understand what dictates the consumer’s media habits for which they need to track critical KPIs. It will give a better idea of sentiment analysis and brand intensity. There is a combined metric that works behind improving social media engagement. Here are five crucial KPIs that you must track:

Brand Mentions

Brand mentions and tags show that people are enjoying talking about your brand on social media. The more the number of brand mentions, the more is the awareness about your brand. It entirely focuses on the relevance and implies that you are maintaining the top position in the minds of people.

Posts

Your number of social media posts depicts the intensity by which you post your content. The more the number of posts, the more is the number of engagement as people get to know more about your brand through your posts. Moreover, if your post is driving more traffic, it implies that you share an excellent piece of content on social media.

Potential Impression

Source: Badrhinoinc

When we talk about potential impressions, then it implies how many times your post will appear in someone’s newsfeed and timeline. It could be either they are following your or someone from their friends has liked or shared your content. However, higher impressions don’t guarantee higher engagement, but it does have a lot to do with the potent traffic it may generate. Well, a lot depends on the quality of content you deliver on the social media platforms.

We don’t say that a higher number of impressions will only be the factor for higher engagement, but we advocate that a higher number is always better.

Sentiments

Measuring social sentiments is always referred to as social sentiment analysis. Here your social team has to pay attention to the social sentiments that you’re a piece of content evokes. It can evoke a negative sentiment or a positive sentiment, which entirely depends on the message your post wants to convey.

In case you have noticed that your content is negatively provoking people then, stop posting such content and find a better way to connect with them. The most common type of content which people like to share is useful content, which could be facts about your brand or related elements.

Moreover, to improve your brand image, you need to build trust among your audience. You can share content that educates them and politely voices your opinion. But, this all starts with knowing your audience. So, to know your audience, you must pay attention to a category of content that rubs them wrong.

You can spend time immersing yourself in customer needs, desires, and pain points. And then you will know what they want.

Engagement

Engagement is another great metric to track when you are into social listening. It is the most important area of social media that you should be concerned about. If you are posting thousands of different content on your social media timeline and none of it is effective to drive engagement, then, it is a sheer waste of time and effort on your part.

For tracking engagement, you must measure the number of likes, dislikes, shares, comments, and subscribes on every social media post you publish. The engagement your social media posts derive is a sign of your level of popularity and quality. Also, more engagement means more reach; if your content receives a greater appreciation from the audience, you are likely to get better impressions in the newsfeed. The more tweets and retweets you get, the more your post will appear.

Mentionlytics to Support Social Listening in the Media and Entertainment Sphere

Mentionlytics is a powerful and user-friendly social listening tool that gives a clear picture of your audience’s likes and dislikes. Even for the media and entertainment industry, it will help to monitor and discover everything about your industry. Try it for free!

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