Imagine you're at an amazing farmer's market filled with every type of fruit on earth. Each stall is jam-packed with fresh produce, from shiny apples to delicious-looking mangoes. You're walking through with a huge basket, tossing in one of every fruit available without thinking about what you need or want. You get home and realize you have a basket full of fruit, but don't know what to do with half of it, and some will go bad before you can use it.

This is how some organizations handle data. They collect vast quantities of it — grabbing every piece of fruit available — because it's abundant and easy. However, much like the aimless shopper, they don't have a plan for how to use it effectively. Some are for show — like displaying beautiful fruit in a glass bowl ("vanity metrics") — while the rest are left untouched, not utilized or understood.

Just as smart shoppers plan their meals and buy fruit accordingly, effective orgs need to collect data with specific goals to ensure they benefit from the data collected. This allows them to truly leverage it to make informed decisions, reduce rework, prevent issues, and find opportunities — ultimately avoiding the pitfalls of letting valuable insights, like super-ripe fruit, go to waste.

Social Media Listening is an often underutilized approach. It involves tracking conversations and mentions across social and other online forums. It can include your org’s and your competitor’s social to gather data from posts, comments, hashtags, and other interactions related to specific topics, brands, or industries. The results are insights into perception, sentiment, and trends. It can be an incredible research technique to maximize ROI.

This week, I’m sharing more about the following tactics so we can work smarter, not harder:

• Mining Customer Support Tickets

• Utilizing Social Media Listening

• Leveraging Previous Research

• Capitalizing on Sales Call Notes

• Maximizing Product Reviews and Ratings

Here are six ways to learn from social:

1. Use sentiment analysis tools to gauge the overall tone of conversations about your brand or products

2. Identify recurring themes or topics in comments and discussions.

3. Engage with customers directly on social media to gather more detailed feedback and address concerns in real-time

4. Analyze social engagement metrics (likes, shares, and comments) to identify popular content and topics of interest

5. Monitor competitor social media channels to gain insights into your customers' preferences and feedback

6. Substantiate research themes with comments, hashtags, and other interactions

Do you or your team utilize social media listening? I’d love to hear how you started and where you apply the learning.

I’m Michele Ronsen, founder of Curiosity Tank. Contact me to learn about user research services, consumer and team training, consulting, and mentoring.