There is little question about the importance of social media to the marketing playbook. Not only does it allow brands to reach consumers where they are, it also provides marketers with a wealth of consumer insights, such as opinions about certain products and brand decisions.

Using social media as a data collection tool, or social intelligence, is considered an important factor for growth by 93% of industry professionals, but just 36% use it regularly to inform business decisions outside of marketing, leading to data silos that prevent important insights from reaching the right department, according to research from Sprout Social. 

“The big thing to remember is that consumer conversations are happening in real time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and so most organizations are still processing that information very slowly,” said Brittany Hennessy, vice president of social intelligence evangelism, Sprout Social. "That's really the pain social teams are feeling. They have seen something on social media, they have a recommendation, but they can't get the insight out of their team to the department that might need it.”

Sprout Social’s “The Intelligence Gap” is based on responses from 705 social media professionals based in the U.S., U.K. and Australia. The data was collected by research firm Panoplai between Feb. 20 and March 16.

Finding a needle in a haystack

While social media can be a treasure trove of consumer data, figuring out how to collect, use and apply that data can prove difficult. Shifting through the sheer volume of information and figuring out what is of actual value can be an arduous and imprecise task. On social media, a few negative comments from a small group of people can overshadow everything else and skew brand perceptions. This is where something like artificial intelligence can be useful to sort through the noise.

“Especially when you are in the middle of a crisis with a brand, you tend to respond to things in a very general way,” said Hennessy. “And sometimes you can make it worse…the best course of action might be no action at all.”

Not using data appropriately can create pitfalls for marketers, with 33% of survey respondents saying their organization didn’t react to or completely missed cultural shifts in the past 12-24 months due to the misuse of consumer insights. Thirty-one percent of respondents said they missed early signals of changing consumers preferences, 26% said they escalated customer issues that could have been solved earlier, 24% said they delayed product or messaging changes and 21% lost market share to a competitor. 

Despite missing signals, social intelligence could prove faster than traditional research methods, with 74% of respondents indicating they receive insights faster via social media. 

However, there is a lack of confidence among professionals. Just 17% of respondents feel "extremely confident” that their organizations are using social intelligence to its full potential. While that number jumps to 43% when looking at the owner or founder, it falls to just 10% for individual contributors. A quarter of respondents at the director level and above and 13% of managers feel confident their organization is making the most of social data. Additionally, 23% of respondents say social media is viewed by their organization as a communications channel, not a data collection tool. 

Whose job is it anyway?

Measurement ownership and data transparency continues to be a key point of focus for the marketing industry. Incorporating social intelligence into the picture could only further complicate things, with 13% of respondents saying organizational silos between departments keeps data collected via social media from being used in strategic decisions.  

There is also the question of who the job of social intelligence falls to. The largest percentage of organizations, 29%, said it was the responsibility of the social media team. Other departments listed include data and analytics (17%), the wider marketing team (15%), communications (10%), insights and research (10%), corporate strategy (9%) and the product team (5%), with only 6% saying it was a shared responsibility.

Usage of social data drops off outside of marketing departments, according to the study. Sixty-two percent of marketing departments and 41% of customer experience departments actively use data collected via social media. Over a quarter, 29%, of corporate strategy teams also use the data, along with product teams (28%), research and development (18%) and investor relations (15%).

“I don't think we have a measurement crisis. I think we have a translation issue,” said Hennessy. “Here's all this information, but what am I supposed to do with it? I have this metric, but what does that mean? And who else in my org is supposed to care? And so I think that's the issue, because without that, you don't have context around the data.”