Big data has opened marketers’ eyes to large volumes of intelligence that can help them improve their campaigns and eventually gain an edge against the competition. One of the branches of intelligence that is currently growing in popularity is social intelligence.

With marketers mining through social media to learn about the thoughts and behaviours of their target audiences, they are expected to overcome the limitations of traditional intelligence gathering. As a result, they no longer have to depend on public and proprietary resources or depend on time-exhausting tests and costly analytic methods.

By accessing the data collected via social platforms, more accurate decisions can be made. This is possible since marketers can create more advanced models that help them understand their customers and predict their future actions via past transactional performance, real-time online and social sentiment, and the current market conditions. For instance, marketers using advanced social intelligence can tap into the interests, hobbies and media consumption of consumers, identifying the best marketing channels and customising messages that have a large impact on them.

Social intelligence can also help businesses tap into trends in real-time and capitalise on them right away. A good example of this is Charlie Sheen’s #winning hashtag, which created a major trend that touched all industries. As the trend grew popular, McDonald’s suggested a new menu item called McWinning. While the item was suggested as a joke, McDonald was able to generate more than 15 000 retweets including one by Sheen himself and generate public relations worth over USD20 million in impressions. This comes to prove how important social intelligence can be when used wisely.

McDonald’s tweet also highlights how monitoring social media activity has become the norm. Also known as social listening, this process assists marketers in identifying opportunities and determining a path for their future endeavors. According to Julian Ardagh, CEO of Effective Intelligence, professional listening tools can enhance the effectiveness of marketer-consumer social engagement and ultimately ensure results.

He comments: “Marketers who aspire to gain the most from social intelligence need to embrace social listening processes in order to uncover content ideas, connect with potential buyers online and offline, and discover true brand advocates. Content ideas help embellish marketers’ messages, while the second and third ensure that these messages find their audience and go beyond them to others who may share the same need.”

Currently, social media data is collected to ensure that customers’ negative message are neutralised through smart responses and to come up with insights that help improve overall service problem areas. However, the future of social intelligence will not be limited to these as marketers plan to utilise its findings to form automated campaigns that satisfy the queries and needs of different consumers within their target market. The question you should ask yourself is: “How do you align your strategy to be part of social intelligence when it dominates the world of marketing?”