Each social media platform has unique benefits for brands trying to reach new audiences and stay connected with their current customers. Instagram’s benefit lies in its visual presence. Using social listening tools, companies can analyze photographs posted by Instagram users to better understand how consumers relate to their brand and products. They can also recognize how those who do not know about the brand could potentially be reached.
Companies can utilize the consumer insights gained from these social listening tools to craft their brand’s Instagram presence and reach more users.
What Are Social Listening Tools?
Social listening tools enable companies to understand the online conversation that is relevant to their brand. These tools often utilize AI to analyze large data sets gathered from various social media platforms and online discussion boards.
Brands focusing on Instagram should use social listening tools with image analysis capabilities. Image analysis is an AI-based tool that can sort through images and identify the presence of a brand’s products, logo, or other relevant visual content. This technology can also identify the emotional content of images through a process known as sentiment analysis.
For example, NetBase Quid AI can use image analysis to identify brand-relevant images in posts, even when a brand is not tagged. This tool can also assign Net Sentiment ratings to audience segments grouped according to demographic characteristics such as age or location or grouped according to shared interests. This means that companies can compare how different kinds of consumers feel about their brand and can do so based on images posted on social media rather than through a survey.
Actionable Instagram Insights
Several different types of consumer insights can be gained by applying social listening tools to Instagram. First, brands can understand the context in which their products are enjoyed, leading to marketing strategies that emphasize those contexts. For example, if consumers tend to post pictures of enjoying a particular beverage at a beach or a park, then advertisements can focus on these settings. And, crucially, a brand’s own Instagram account can feature posts that display their brand and products in those settings.
Companies can also use social listening tools to perform a competitor analysis on Instagram. This process involves analyzing posts that feature a competitor’s logo or products and comparing the content of these posts to those that feature a company’s own logo or products. Brands can identify market gaps that their competitors are missing and craft Instagram content that targets those gaps. Brands can also better understand why competitors are the subject of positive sentiment.
In addition to images, Instagram also features hashtags and comments, and these features offer another opportunity for sentiment analysis. The goal in analyzing these comments is often to identify extremes of sentiment, consumers that are very positive or negative in their posts about a brand. Comments that are especially positive can be highlighted in the company’s marketing materials, while comments that are especially negative provide an opportunity to publicly display effective customer support. Additionally, brands can analyze comments and hashtags to identify topics and interests that matter to their audience and create content that fits those interests.
Creating Instagram Stories
Equipped with the consumer insights gained from using social listening tools, brands can create more effective Instagram Stories that connect with consumers. Stories allow brands to share multiple photos or videos (or a combination of both) and add effects such as drawings, stickers, music, and even interactive options.
This feature enables brands to craft their own mini-series to promote products, events, or sales. While social listening tools are not required to create Instagram Stories, the brands that stand out in the competitive Instagram landscape understand how to draw on consumer insights gained from social listening to create attention-grabbing content.
