TechBytes with Jason Klein Co-Founder and Co-CEO at ListenFirst

Tell us about your role and the team/technology you handle at ListenFirst Media.

Our goal for ListenFirst was to create the most comprehensive social analytics solution. ListenFirst’s technology combines earned, organic, and paid content and campaign analysis, across every social channel, to give brands a single source of truth to drive results. We empower marketers and researchers with meaningful social insights to power the entire Marketing funnel, from strategy and planning to real-time tracking, optimization, and conversion. And, we offer brands a unique depth of expertise on their consumers, competitors, and markets to help them gain market share, build loyalty, and drive revenue.

Do you leverage AI ML algorithms at ListenFirst? If yes, tell us more about your AI research and analytics.

ListenFirst is powered by deep Machine Learning and AI to unite billions of consumer signals from every social platform, giving brands a complete view of their customer and performance, and analytics to drive business outcomes. ListenFirst offers insight on owned, organic, earned, and paid social activities and has the deepest and most complete data set, including cross-platform authorized data benchmarks no other company can provide. We do this across a variety of use cases for social data, including branded content, video engagement, and advertiser ROI.

What is the current technology driving Data Analytics for Branded Content Measurement?

ListenFirst’s Branded Content Measurement is powered by AI and Machine Learning, optimized for performance, and made to deliver actionable insights that change the outcome of campaigns. Our platform analyzes millions of social posts daily and identify those that are branded content, enabling clients to understand the performance and ROI of owned, competitive, and industry content partnerships across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Tumblr.

Additionally, we can find the top-performing branded content across social media platforms and filter by post type, day part, sponsored content, and similar segments. That allows us to see which kinds of content elicit certain reactions. With this deep insight into what drives the best performing content for our clients’ campaigns, we’re able to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to new social media Marketing strategies.

What are your predictions about social media analytics transforming businesses in the next 3 years?

We’ve seen social analytics evolve beyond what was just social listening and trying to understand what people are saying on social, to taking a more comprehensive approach for marketers who want a better understanding of how their creative is performing, how to better engage with their audience based on robust data sets and using that data to better inform their overall Marketing strategy.

Over time, we are going to see more brands focus less on vanity metrics, such as likes and follower counts, and more on engagement. The same goes for social platforms like Instagram and YouTube, which expanded its test to hide like counts and changed the way it displays subscriber counts respectively. Follower count doesn’t correlate to active and engaged audiences and we’re starting to see brands understand that they should be measuring click-through rate and conversion metrics to determine the effectiveness of their social media content when the goal goes beyond just overall brand awareness.