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In the age of social media, social listening can give you critical insights into people’s views. However, life can be portrayed through rose-tinted glasses, so it is best to use search insights in conjunction with other research methods since website searches are not filtered. Furthermore, search listening applies to all industries.
1. Anonymised Data
The general public is aware of the fact data is anonymised, making it the richest set of data in terms of honesty. To put this in perspective, a mother may google ‘why is my baby sick all the time’ while posting a picture of her baby looking perfect on Instagram. Asking why her baby is sick all the time may attract trolling or negative judgements if she had put this on a different social platform.
2. Lots of Data
Moreover, a person makes 3-4 searches on average every day. All this searching means there is a hell of a lot of data on virtually everyone and everything. In contrast, people may not mention you on social media enough to analyse the data if you are a smaller business.
3. Different Data Sources
Consequently, there are different data sources; for instance, you can use the “People Also Ask” data that Google provides. These questions arise due to the algorithm, which searches for commonly searches queries with a considerable volume. If you know people are searching for XYZ when they are searching for your company, this is an excellent source of inspiration for the content. This could also be a strategy to engage with this audience. You can do all of this with Search Listening!
In this Search Listening example, we can see the stem search “subscription box food” populated PAA “what is the best food subscription box?”.
So, if you were a food subscription box brand, you might want to write blogs on why you are the best food subscription box and post them to answer the questions people are actively asking.
Similarly, “Is Hello Fresh or Gousto cheaper?”. It would be a great idea to publish a blog or social post on the value for money aspect.
Accordingly, you could this data to make evidence-based decisions in content curation. For example, writing content that answers the questions “people also ask”. Use the questions people ask as the titles. This means that you are more likely to engage content as people who already search for this content will come across it.
