A Lesson in Social Data for Brands: Expression vs. Intention

Social Data is an amazing source of consumer expressions that allows brands to draw audience insights, measure campaign effectiveness, respond in real time, create engagement platforms and profile their customers. The process of Social Listening is a very effective method of capturing these expressions but it can be difficult to determine the users intent behind the expression unless they explicitly state it.

The difference between consumer ‘expressions’ and ‘intentions’ is very important. An expression is the process of making known one’s thoughts or feelings. Where as, an intention is an idea or plan of what one is going to do.

Search query data is the single richest source of customer intentions. Analysing this data in combination with the expressions captured through Social Listening can help your brand gain deeper customer insights and drive business value..

Below is an example of the insights each of these data sources can provide.

Tweet: “Love brand ‘x’ new whitening toothpaste advertisement. Very funny. Lol.”

Insight: Advertisement resonated with the audience.

Missing data: Is there intent to purchase?

Search Query: “Where can I buy brand ‘x’ whitening toothpaste in London?”

Insight: Customer intends to purchase the product in London.

Missing Data: What was the stimulus of the intent?

You can see quickly from the example above that combining these two data sources can help close the insight loop.  Using the scenario outlined in the example above brand ‘x’ could use social listening to determine the sentiment of conversations around their new advertisement for their whitening toothpaste. If they achieved ‘x’ number of conversations and found that 70% of the expressions were positive they could combine this with search query data to find relationships in the volume of search queries around purchase intent.

So how do you access this search query data?

Search Intent Modeling (SIM) which is a data-driven process for classifying consumer behaviour for search queries relating to a specific source, type or subject. SIM helps in identifying consumer needs and the intent behind their search queries. The process of SIM is lengthy so I won’t go into detail here.

Lesson: Expressions are valuable but combined with Intentions your social data will drive real business value.

Additional articles on Social Media Data by Kohlben Vodden: Stop Listening and Start Thinking