Beyond Social

Eavesdropping on the Internet: Why Social Listening is Your Secret Superpower

• Vista Social • Episode 31

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Think your brand is on top of the conversation just because you’re responding to comments? Think bigger.


In this episode of Beyond Social, hosts Reggie Azevedo and Vitaly Veksler dive deep into the art and science of social listening — the unsung hero of modern marketing. 

What’s the difference between listening and monitoring? 
Why does every brand dream of knowing what their competitors are planning? And, most importantly, how can even small businesses afford the tools to do it?


From the challenges of privacy laws to the wildly varied pricing of listening tools (looking at you, five-money-sign platforms), this episode explores how to decode the online chatter to uncover insights that matter. Whether you’re a small business, an agency, or a brand trying to make sense of market trends, this discussion is packed with practical advice on turning data into decisions.


Stick around as we challenge the myth that global listening is only for the big players and share how anyone can access meaningful social insights without breaking the bank. Because in today’s democratized marketing world, information isn’t just power, it’s possibility.


Tune in and start listening better!

[00:00:00] Introduction and Ad Data Insights

[00:01:00] Welcome to Beyond Social Podcast

[00:02:00] Social Listening vs. Monitoring

[00:08:00] Social Networks and Data Privacy

[00:13:00] Cost Drivers for Social Listening Tools

[00:18:00] Closing Thoughts and Call to Action



The data is so valuable. A lot of networks would much rather use it themselves. Like, if you notice the ads, for example, when you run ads, they get quite detailed. Oh, the interest groups. Oh my God. I mean, they have all sorts of data on their customers, right? They can target people quite nicely, right? Hey, welcome back to the Beyond Social Podcast. I'm Reggie, and this is the show where we go behind the scenes on how marketers are doing amazing things on social and how we're trying to build a tool that helps to support them. Today, Vitaly and I are sitting down to talk a little bit about social listening. It's been a topic that has come up a lot in our sales team, inbound marketing. We've seen that in their support channel. So I kind of want to ,I want to dissect it a little bit, probably starting with what is listening, what is probably monitoring because that comes up a little bit as well as talk about the differences between those, and then I've definitely got a couple of questions for you. Yeah, so fundamentally brands, Want to know, broadly speaking, right, how they're being perceived by, across social space, right? Um, out of the box, posting to social and responding to comments, that's really sort of, uh, reactive things to do. Like, oh, you got a new feature, so you're going to post, or a comment came in, you're going to respond. And even if you do have some reporting on comments like positive, negative sentiment and whatnot, that's still fairly reactive, right? These things are kind of happening already. Um, a lot of brands, if not all of them, right, they have very legitimate interest to know in a broad context, what is the perception about them across social and web, as well as potentially how they stack up against the competitors. I mean, what can be more valuable than knowing that, say, People mention your brand in maybe not so colorful and not so positive light with respect to say quality of customer service. Something that may not show up in comments. There could be a remote destination on social media where these sort of that could be in discussion. Um, and also what could be more valuable than knowing something about the strategy that your competitors are taking. You know, how often are they publishing? What hashtags are they using? You know, what type of content are they disseminating? So, to answer your question, listening is, and monitoring, these sort of like in interchangeable terms. I'm not sure if for the sake of this conversation we even want to maybe make a distinction, I feel like they both can be used with equal degree of, sort of, uh, informity. Um, you want to monitor content that's coming through your comments and messages, say for the purposes of brand awareness or brand safety or, sentiment analysis and whatnot, right? So let's call it monitoring. And you want to be out there also monitoring or listening globally, right? What's being said about your brand or about your competitor brand. It could also be an opportunity maybe to, um, analyze and research the market. Would you say, uh, is there a demand for this product I'm trying to launch? Or this, um, in this specific country that I'm looking to expand into, are there opportunities where listening could be helpful? Beyond just competitor analysis or brand sentiment. Yeah, so I think there are a lot of sort of wants. There are a lot of asks right in this space. Like, realistically, I would want to know every move my competitor takes. I would want to be notified about every intent to buy my product anywhere in the world at any given time. So these are all great intents, right? So you are, but you want that as a brand and getting that is though is impossible. And therefore wanting it is somewhat impractical because social media is a particularly notoriously complex space when it comes to privacy laws and keeping information private. And some networks have gotten into quite a bit of, uh, of trouble when that information is not properly secured. Uh, certain countries, particularly Europe, right, is really going after networks quite harshly for making data about consumer behavior commercially available for sale. So, to answer your question, yes, generally speaking, there is a lot of desire to know a lot about consumer behavior, about what people are saying on social, about your brand, intent data. In, in reality, a lot of that data is impossible to get. and you will have to sort of get creative extrapolating, uh, based on some other data gathering techniques. So for example, if you cannot get the data at all from Facebook, maybe you might be able to track hashtags on Instagram, get enough of a sample of data, and derive your necessary conclusions from that. But I wish there was a way to say, "Hey, Facebook, you know, give me, you know, give me all the conversations when people want to buy, you know, a shoe." Sneakers. Yeah. So that would be like a really nice system, but there isn't one, right? Both because of privacy laws, as well as the data is so valuable, a lot of networks would much rather use it themselves. Fair. Like if you notice the ads, for example, when you run ads, they get quite detailed. Oh, the interest groups. Oh my God. I mean, they have all sorts of data on their customers, right? They can target people quite nicely, right? But externalizing the data is, is, um, is an unrealistic ask. So, you, you mentioned that there's some networks that are very private, and obviously the meta is out there, and I mean, really realistically, most of them, there's some that are a little bit more lenient, let's say with like X, possibly a situation with like Reddit, or something along those lines. Um, is there a value, I guess, in trying to say, Hey, I want to create a more complete picture? Are there tools out there who will step over that line and say, "Hey, you know what? I know officially this stuff's not available, but I can get it for you." I think... What's the risk? I think the different networks might have different perspective of what's considered to be personal data. Arguably is a social post, the personal data. Um, many networks begun to differentiate between and create a separation between what they consider to be personal profile and a business profile. I suppose no different than you being a solopreneur and, or you being an LLC, I suppose, right? And then, and if that happens, obviously tax code is different for, for in both instances. Um, so networks have been kind of doing the same things. Trying to kind of get people to really rethink who they are, and if they want, say, um, to use apps, or if they want to integrate with some systems, it would force you to become a business. So as a result, your data could maybe be a little bit more freely available. Twitter is really good about mining data in a fairly complex way. Um, it goes without saying though that there's really no way to extract all of the data on all of the subjects. Not because it's impossible to formulate sort of a query or a request, they allow you to create fairly elaborate sort of asks. But say you search for the word Apple, I bet Apple as a word is mentioned a million times a second in tweets. So imagine even if there was a way to pull in a million tweets per second, that's 60 million a minute, that's like a lot per hour. What are you going to do with all that data? There is nothing valuable you can extract from that data. So for example, in Twitter, what they have is they do have ability to sort of, Search, and you can, and that's sort of part of our search mechanisms as well when, when talking, listening about, you know, within Vista Social. Uh, but they also have a, a nice really feature that allows you to see values. So you can put in a criteria and you can, you will know, is this a trending, is this a relevant topic, right? Is there enough value? Which is very interesting. Remember how we talked about extrapolating? So you could use this. To really understand the, the amount of volume there is to a certain ask or to a certain question or to a certain, uh, intent that the customers might have. Can you then safely port that over to another network? Like, once you've gotten a trend out of Twitter, can you say that a similar trend will continue to be, say, existing? on Facebook. I mean, it's, it's, I think it's a question to maybe a statistician, uh, or somebody who can maybe make or create a relationship between your presence on both networks. But I would say that absent any other form of, uh, putting numbers to these things, I think that's going to be your closest estimate. It's going to give you very, it's going to give you 100 percent accurate estimate for Twitter. And then you're just going to have to assume that there is a certain margin of error. if you were to consider that same trend to exist on other networks, would it be a tolerable margin of error? I think that's going to really be something, um, that you will just sort of assess. It's sort of no different than, say, all those pollsters out there that poll for a variety of different topics right across the country, right? There are 350 million people in the United States. Not everybody's asked the question, but there is a sampling technique, right, that allows you to sample. in a way where the margin of error is going to be very small. So to your question of the fact that some networks don't offer any ways of retrieving data, any meaningful ways of retrieving data, Which most of them do not. You can still utilize the data out of other networks to establish sort of patterns or to understand the trends. Right. Yeah, absolutely. The entire idea here is that you're not scouring the entire web. It's trying to create a picture, put together a puzzle of how people are talking, how they perceive your brand. How certain conversations are happening in an industry. And yeah, it's never going to be 100 percent perfect, but that's where you really have to understand your tolerance level as an organization. And that, so. Yeah, and also to kind of also maybe to answer some of the earlier questions that you had. On monitoring versus listening, even though I think the terminology kind of gets a little tricky if we do create distinctions, but oftentimes people, also brands that is kind of, their goal is to understand the behaviors within their own networks, meaning that they want to understand the sentiment of all the comments they want to identify certain conversations. They want to quickly maybe categorize them and respond to them faster. All of that is 100 percent possible because that just operates on the data that we, as Vista for example, we already have. Those kind of listeners will give you 100 percent accuracy in terms of results. I guess what we are discussing here is the ability to mine the data from outside of the system. And perhaps One would also say, ask, does it really matter, is this a, sort of like a small business problem? Or is this a, sort of a larger business problem? Right? As a small business, do you particularly care for the noise surrounding your brand and the accuracy of that, you know, um, because clearly we get asked by, by users to deliver on global listening, on the listening that kind of goes out there. Do you have a sense as to what kind of customers are asking for this? Are they are on a smaller side that is SMB, I don't know, less than 20 employees, you know, a couple of social profiles. Or do they fall more within a larger, like more established brands? Yeah, definitely the latter. The larger organizations are the ones, I think two sides to that. I think a lot of the conversations when we have that, we, we, you know, have conversations with our sales teams on, on the trends, a lot of it has to do with the reality of budgeting. They understand that there's a cost to us on our end, having to go to, let's say X and request a certain volume size, a certain sample size of individual results. Um, and so I think over the last, I don't know, 5, 10 years is more and more people have become comfortable with SMMs and, you know, platforms that do analytics. They've somewhat understood, oh, this is probably going to be out of my price range, versus a larger organization with a little bit of a bigger budget. The bigger brand risk, when a PR situation could arise, they have a little bit more to invest and the risk is greater for them to stand by and not try to understand trends before it becomes a bigger situation. Yeah, and I guess also to mention, right, to the listeners is that the pricing for listening, because one would ask like where, why is it so expensive, right? The expense of the listening comes from the fact that social networks like Twitter, uh, they are fee based nowadays, right? In order for a tool to pull in the data, the tool has to pay, uh, Twitter for the data. And that's kind of where a lot of tools sort of calculate the pricing for what the listening would be. I think. From what I found, there is still fairly egregious instances of pricing when it comes to, uh, listening. Do you want to throw any names who you think are doing it in an egregious way? Uh, I mean, I don't want to get in trouble here, but Meltwater, Sprinklr, those are usually the ones that... You know, on Google Maps, you go look at a restaurant, there's like one money sign through, I think, maybe five money signs? Let's put those two on the five money signs side of things. Whereas probably Hootsuite, Sprout are in that three money sign sort of situation. Right. Yeah. So I think they're still marking up, uh, the listening quite, quite a lot. And I think in reality they are making it feel as though this is a high end enterprise feature. I think, uh, when we were building ours and. Perhaps we are way less greedy than some of these tools, right? I think our pricing is it's, it's, it's an affordable pricing point for any business out there to, to be able to. Listen, and there is nothing high end enterprise. It is kind of how I believe it's perceived."Oh, you know, the global listening is only for the big boys." It isn't. I mean, it'll probably still cost you, um, like a topic search is probably what's going to run you around maybe three, four, five hundred dollars a month, uh, if that. Uh, but it, you know, it will give you a wealth of information on, on what you need to do. And, um, and, and the information, you know, will contain results from Twitter, from Reddit, from Facebook, from YouTube, from, from a lot of different places. So not the Kind of the enterprise grade sort of feature that I think has been perceived to be. Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely not. I think that's the beauty of a lot of the things that we've tried to build, too, is the level of accessibility. There's, there's the benefit to everybody, right? And, I don't know, we can, 500,000 small businesses out there, whatever the number is. A podcast I listened to last week. There's a lot, there's a lot of small businesses. I've actually seen millions probably. Kind of seems weird to say, "Hey, you guys don't need it" or "let me price you out of something like this," you know, versus the benefit they can bring. Yeah. The agencies that are servicing these, uh, businesses also, you know, could benefit from listening, from, from, from understanding the competitor landscape. Uh, and yeah, so having such a tool affordable, but just, I just wanted to kind of talk about the nature and the origins of the pricing and it is mostly to do with the... the costs of some of these APIs that became fee based. Luckily for everyone, most of these APIs are not yet charging for the actual scheduling or responding to messages. Uh, if that ever becomes a reality, the price for the entire SMM offering is going to just go through the roof. So, uh, I don't think it's going to happen because they view all these tools by day. I mean, all the social networks, they kind of view the tools as the necessary, uh, enablers. A lot of social media activity. Yeah. Uh, but at the same time, I think they do understand that if we, the tools are able to then sell their data, they might as well have a cut at it. So, uh, but yeah, it's a, it's a great topic and I think it's such a simple feature to use also that if, if there is a brand out there that's not yet, you know, have tried global listening, I think, uh, with Vista you can certainly explore it in a very affordable way, um, and make decisions that are just as informed as, uh, the decisions of the bigger brand. As we often talk in our podcast of how democratized the world of marketing has become, where a small brand can easily compete with a large brand and you don't need the millions of dollars in TV ads the way you maybe needed it, you know, 20 years ago. Uh, today you'll need, you know, yourself, your creativity. Uh, maybe a few hundred dollars for the tool to kind of, you know, streamline and optimize your processes. And, and that's that. So, no millions of dollars, nothing like that. That's awesome. Alright, sweet. Thanks for taking the time to tell me. I know that my curiosity usually gets the best of me in these topics. Yeah. I appreciate you. Thank you guys for listening. Thank you for, for tuning in, whether it's on YouTube or Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you're consuming this content, make sure to share it, to like it. And if you have a topic idea you'd like us to see, uh, to see covered, maybe you even want to join us here in the studio to get interviewed or to feature your agency, your brand, definitely reach out to us, "vistasocial.com/podcast". And we'll see you next week.