Brief: Predictive Social Analytics Is On The Horizon

Most of the analytics that social listening platforms provide are retrospective and explanatory — any listening platform on the market can provide data about spikes in volume or analysis on the sentiment of what consumers are saying, which gives customer insights (CI) professionals a directional clue about how to do better next time. But money is not made in the reactive, the retrospective, or the explanatory. It's made in the predictive — in your company's ability to know what consumers will be talking about, caring about, and buying next. Social data should be able to do this, but it's only about a third of the way there. It is theoretically possible to know that when people talk about X on social, they're Y% more likely to buy something. Or that conversation volume about Beyoncé is X today, but it will be Y tomorrow.