Announcing Social Listening in Rival IQ

It’s here! Social Listening has arrived in Rival IQ, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to roll out the red carpet for this exciting new suite of listening features.

Measure anything and everything from sentiment to post volume to the number of authors posting about brands that matter most to you in conversations across the web. We’re combing sources like Reddit, Quora, Twitter, news sites, and so much more to ensure you have the freshest data about who’s talking about your brand (or your competitors). That’s right, we’re rolling out a totally new set of features all built on Quid’s expansive social listening platform for the ultimate in social listening capabilities.

If you’re a die-hard analytics junkie but haven’t set foot in the land of listening just yet, you might be wondering what listening can do that owned analytics can’t. We’ve got you! Social listening casts an even wider net online to help you catch conversations that are happening about your brand in a ton of different places, from the front page of Reddit to an offhand comment on a blog you’ve never heard of.

Pairing these perceptions around the web with your existing social media analytics will give you the fullest picture of your brand’s health online to help you make better decisions from branding to product lines and everything in between.

And we wouldn’t be Rival IQ without a competitive lens, which is why Social Listening in Rival IQ makes it just as easy to keep an ear to the ground about conversations about your competitors as it is to monitor your own brand perceptions.

Let’s jump into this dynamic new set of social listening features!

Understand perceptions of your brand with oodles of data sources

Analyze and review data from millions of domains alongside your social media analytics in Rival IQ to help teams without a dedicated data expert keep a finger on the pulse of online brand health.

Insights in a single click

Start listening to conversations about your brand or industry directly within your Rival IQ landscape in Instant Search. We’ve got tons of AI-generated queries for you to use right out of the box based on searches we think might be relevant for you, like searches about REI and Patagonia in this outdoor retailer-focused landscape below.

Looking for a little more customization and control? Use our intuitive query builder to see brand sentiment and conversation highlights, so you can get the info you want without spending hours building a topic.

Here you can see our AI-generated query, powered by ChatGPT, for conversations about REI. Easily fine-tune or narrow your results by adding more primary terms or words to include or exclude, or scroll down a little further in our query builder to narrow your sources or omit things like coupons and autoposts.

Once you’ve got your query just the way you want it, pop into your Instant Search results page for oodles of interactive analytics about your term. See your high-level stats in the At a Glance section for info on the number of posts about your search term, the potential impressions across tons of sources around the web, the number of authors posting about your brand, and your net sentiment, which describes how positively or negatively people are talking about your brand. Don’t miss those blue sparklines to show how things are fluctuating in each of these key areas.

Ready to really dig into your stats? All of our analytics are interactive, meaning you can click on a popular term, sentiment driver, author, domain or other category to see the related posts.

We know Rival IQ users are analytics nerds, which is why we’ve included effortless visuals you can easily drop into a big presentation or high-level client email. Try including a time series of volume of conversations about your brand or a word cloud with positive and negative attributes like the one above highlighting top trending products for REI as well as sentiments like “great deal” and “REI co-op cool haul.”

Let’s take the spike in conversations relating to Jeni’s Ice Cream on June 10th. As we can see in the correlated green graph, it didn’t have a huge impact on the brand’s net sentiment, but posts about the brand more than tripled.

When we dig in further, we can see that this jump in posts about Jeni’s had nothing to do with the brand’s own posting. Rather, the spike was correlated to Hollywood film director James Gunn posting a love letter on Twitter to one of the brand’s flavors, which spurred ice cream and comic book geeks around the world into conversation. Jeni’s might’ve missed this spike in posts about the brand if they were looking only at direct responses to their owned social, which is why social listening and social analytics are such a potent combo when used together.

Best-in-class sentiment and sentiment driver analysis

Analyze millions of posts with the help of natural language processing (NLP) to understand how consumers feel about your brand and the specific conversational themes that contribute to that sentiment, so you can identify brand strengths and weaknesses. We partnered with our pals at Quid for full access to their top-of-the-line NLP and analytics in every inch of Social Listening by Rival IQ.

Want to automatically pull out behaviors and emotions your brand is generating with customers online? Pop into the Sentiment Drivers by Type panel, which will help you visualize conversations about your brand online. Let’s look at how customers and feeling about health food fave Dave’s Killer Bread, for example.

We bet you can guess green means good and bigger fonts mean more mentions. Words like “love,” “awesome,” “delicious” and “prefer” all point to a bread brand that’s seriously resonating with customers. The social media team at Dave’s might want to keep an eye on posts about the brand’s offerings being “depressing” or “not perfect,” though. Don’t miss clicking into one of the highlighted sentiments for post-level information about related conversations, making it easy to see exactly who’s talking about Dave’s being less than perfect.

You can easily toggle this word cloud into a table to see exactly how many posts there are relating to these emotions from across the web, or you can quickly toggle between attributes (words, phrases, and emojis), behavior, and emotion for a full picture of the sentiment drivers impacting your brand online.

We track net sentiment day by day so you can easily spot trends over time. In the example above, sparkling water brand Spindrift had some seriously positive conversations happening about their brand online, but took a little dip in early May.

Now, let’s dig into sentiment analysis a little more.

We don’t want to brag (much), but here’s a tidy example of how NLP can go beyond the sentiment of the post to drill into feelings specifically about your brand. In this Reddit post, a Redditor is talking a little smack about a competing brand of sparkling water, which might make it seem like the net sentiment of the post should be negative. But wait–we’re assessing sentiment based on the primary search term, which in this case is “Spindrift,” so we’re able to see that this post actually has a positive sentiment towards the brand because of the last sentence about Spindrift’s stronger flavor.

Comprehensive metrics to help you keep your finger on the pulse of your online brand health

Gearheads, this one’s for you: let’s walk you through tons of new metrics available in Social Listening.

Post volume

Use post volume (grouped here by day) to easily identify upticks in conversation about your search term. Hover over a given day to drill into the conversations that took place during that spike.

Popular Terms

Now that you have a handle on your post volume, pop into the Popular Terms table to see words and phrases that are most popular in posts about your brand.

No surprise that frequent posters about beloved Blue Bell Ice Cream are all about sharing their favorite flavors and combos like a Dr. Pepper float. This Popular Term word cloud (which is also available as a list) also makes it easy to see that fans love the brand for its Texas roots, which might be good info for the brand as they plan its next marketing push. Just like in the Sentiment Driver word cloud above, you can click on any of these terms to see posts relating to them for a deeper understanding of these conversations.

Sources and Domains

Analyzing your sentiment and key terms in conversations about your brands is important, but so is understanding where these conversations are happening across the web.

Analyze your top sources at a glance to see where people are talking about your brand or query the most. Sources aggregate websites into high-level categories like “news” and “blogs.” In this example, Twitter is alive and well for Blue Bell Ice Cream and is definitely a place the brand should be paying attention to in efforts to connect with customers.

We’re retrieving data from millions of websites, and categorized the sources into the most frequently requested source types:

• Blogs: Sites like the Mommy Blog, Kotaku, Gizmodo, Gawker, or LiveJournal
• Blog/article comments: Comments on blogs and news articles
• Forums: Sites like Reddit, parenting forums, eBay forums, BabyCenter, Gaia Online, CafeMom, or InvisionFree
• News: Sites like the New York Times or PR Newswire. News sources do not include author name or demographics.
• Professional reviews: Sites like CNET or PCWorld
• Twitter: A sample of tweets
• YouTube: A sample of videos from YouTube. Results include comments on videos.
• Other: Other selected sources around the web

If you want a little more detail, dig into Domains for more specificity about the domains and subdomains where your brand is seeing the most traction. For example, clicking on “reddit.com” will pull up comments in tons of subreddits so you can easily see where these conversations are happening.

Just like everywhere else in Social Listening, we also include post previews, potential impressions, and sentiment analysis on these posts so you can gauge what’s happening in the conversation with just one click.

Authors

Pop up to the At a Glance panel for an estimate of the total number of authors posting about your brand, or use the Authors panel to see the people posting most frequently about your brand online and where they’re posting. We also aggregate sentiment by author so you can see with one click whether a popular author is generally singing your praises or throwing shade.

In this luxury car query, we can see top authors who have posted more than 100 times in just the last 30 days about BMWs, as well as the sites where these authors are seeing the most traction for their posts. With brands working so hard to manage relationships online these days, this panel can be a great place to keep an eye on your current stable of influencers or to source new ones.

Hashtags

Savvy social media marketers know hashtags are more than just a Twitter thing at this point, which is why we have a dedicated table about the most popular hashtags used in posts about your search query.

The Blue Bell Ice Cream team can see at a glance here that some of the most popular posts about their brand across the web involve conversations about new flavors, which is a surefire nudge for their product that they should keep developing creative tastes for customers instead of resting on their laurels. Just like in other areas of Social Listening, you can click on any of these hashtags for a snapshot of related posts, potential impressions, and their sentiment.

People Mentioned and Brands Mentioned

Keeping an ear to the ground can be hugely helpful for finding new influencers for your brand or even other brands to partner with.

In this Blue Bell Ice Cream example, the brand can use the People Mentioned table to identify folks who are mentioned most frequently in posts about Blue Bell, and can click into each row for more detail and sample posts.

Now, let’s look at a competitor example. Posts about Ben & Jerry’s most often include references to these brands, suggesting that frequent commenters have junk food on the brain. We’re not saying the world needs a Flamin’ Hot Cheetos/Ben & Jerry’s collab, but we’re also *not* saying that.

Monitor *everything* from competitors to campaigns to industry trends

Never miss a trending topic or a sentiment shift from your competitors with easy-to-use search and always-on alerting.

Virtually unlimited ad-hoc searches for competitive clarity

There’s nothing worse than hitting your daily limit in an important work tool right before a big presentation or budget showdown, which is why we’re thrilled to offer unlimited Instant Search. Explore any topic, any brand, or any campaign as many times as you want each day, so you never need to worry about limiting your research.

Save searches for easy reference and comparison

If you’re ready to narrow your monitoring or want to keep track of topics you search regularly, save queries so you can come back to them.

Creating a Saved Search also makes it easy to compare and contrast brands or ideas that are most relevant to your business. In the example above, we can see that Burt’s Bees is dominating in share of voice compared to Neutrogena and Aveeno in the last 30 days, while the brand’s net sentiment is a little more in line with competitors. Think of this view as your at-a-glance dashboard for high-level metrics like posts and net sentiment so you know how your key brands and competitors are doing across the web.

Receive alerts on volume spikes so you can respond quickly

Be aware of large increases in conversations and the sentiment drivers related to the spike about your saved search, so you never miss a chance to respond on behalf of your brand.

We’ll deliver key stats about changes in post volume and notable search terms directly to your inbox to help you stay on top of conversations about the topics that matter to you. You decide the topics you want alerts about, as well as the frequency of the alerts and the recipients, making it easy to loop in the right people at the right time.

Drill into specific conversations

Zoom into the specific posts that contributed to a particular insight such as a key topic, sentiment, or other insight, so you can understand the full context of the conversation.

Hover over any spike in your post volume or sentiment for a preview of related posts from a variety of sources like Reddit or news sites. When we dig in on this BMW Instant Search, we can see a sample of conversations happening across the web about the brand, including a Reddit conversation about electric cars for sale in Europe and a profile on a popular car blog about the luxury BMW 7 series.

You can also get a ballpark for your potential impressions and an indication of whether posts about your primary term are positive, negative, or neutral. We can bet BMW is already paying a lot of attention to what’s happening in the luxury electric car market, but even just this sample of posts is a good reminder of where the brand should be focusing its innovation and marketing attention.

How to get Social Listening in Rival IQ

We’re thrilled to announce that Social Listening is now available in Rival IQ starting today. This suite of features is baked right into the new Engage and Engage Pro plans we launched on June 21st, and anyone who starts a free 14-day trial will also be able to listen in on conversations happening around the web.

For current customers, Social Listening is now live in Rival IQ, either as a trial through July 31st or included in your plan. After that date, upgrade to a plan that includes Social Listening for full access.

Engage plans start at $349/month and include 2 Saved Searches plus all the features detailed here, including Instant Search, advanced sentiment analysis, alerts, and more. For those in need of even more competitive insight, Engage Pro plans start at $559/month and include all of the above plus 10 Saved Searches.

Wrapping it up: Social Listening

We hope you’re as stoked as we are about this amazing new suite of features. We can’t wait to see all the different ways you’ll use Social Listening to keep an ear to the ground, make smarter business decisions, and of course augment your competitive social media analytics in Rival IQ.

If you’d like to share your excitement or request a feature you’d like to see in Rival IQ, don’t be afraid to hit us up on Twitter.