Synthesio

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Project duration:
Oct 2022- Dec 2022

Team Members:
Coco Wang- Marketing & User Research
Mitali Medhe- Markering Research
Fei Xiao- Data Scientist

Industry Expert Mentors:
Allen Bonde- CMO@Synthesio
Emma Huff- Marketing Manager@Synthesio

The Background:

“A social listening pioneer and global leader in AI-enabled consumer intelligence”
Synthesio, founded in 2006, is a global-leading social listening platform under Ipsos Technology Company. It provides social listening tools with audience insights to help brands and agencies track the impact of social and mainstream media conversations. The Synthesio Social Media Intelligence Suite collects the most comprehensive data on social media activity, providing you with insights into both qualitative and quantitative aspects of social media. Business units can leverage Synthesio dashboards, pre-built use cases, custom reports, and social media control center displays along with Ipsos social intelligence services to make strategic business decisions.

The Objective

The main objective of this project is to investigate the full impact of social assets/channels Synthesio is currently using and the syndication partners in the purchase journey. The objective will be achieved by answering the following questions:

How are target communities of interest discussing Synthesio and our competitors on social channels?

By answering the question, Synthesio would be able to find out:
1. The customer persona of people interacting with us on social media, and their attitude toward our company.
2. The impact on the purchase journey.
3. The trend of social marketing.

Initial Solution Approach

The initial research design to understand the impact of social media on final purchase is:

Synthesio User Profile

Based on the data provided by the Synthesio team, the top 3 Synthesio user types are...
By title:

23% Analyst

15% Senior Manager

38% Director

By department:

16% Business Development

14% Sales

13% Marketing

By company size:

29% 10-200 employees

15% 1k-5k employees

24% 10k employees

Impact Of Synthesio VS Competitors On Major Social Media Platforms

After conducting secondary research, it can be found that Synthesio’s major competitors are:

- Performances of target communities on different platforms.

With the data provided by Synthesio on social brand mentions of Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and other online mentions of Synthesio plus key competitors for the past 8 months, some basic information are gathered on media sources where target communities of interest discuss Synthesio and its competitors and brand names mentioned.

Charts above show the media channels and top-mentioned social listening companies from different countries. From left to right, we have: (1) 10 media channels that discuss social listening most frequently. (2) The number of times companies are mentioned.

From the chats, we learned that:

(1) The main social platform where Synthesio and competitors are discussed is Twitter.
(2) NetBase Quid ranks first with 26840 times being mentioned. Sythesio ranks sixth with 745 times being discussed, indicating a major gap between the competitors.

Some other conclusions:

- Social listening companies, with around 7, 000 mentions, are discussed mostly in the United States, leading other countries such as the UK, France, or Canada. English is the most frequently used language with over 30,000 contents discussing.

- Detailed Analysis on performances of target communities on Twitter.

Processing Contexts
Since Twitter is the primary media channel where Synthesio and competitors are being discussed, the analysis is focused on the keywords using the NLP model. To get the outcomes, data collected is processed in python by combining 100 text groups with the highest potential reaches into a list. Then content is cleaned up by clearing out unnecessary information such as emoji, URLs, dingbats, etc., and the text groups are separated into phrases. (From left to right, top to bottom, we have [1]NetBase Quid [2]Sprinklr [3]Brandwatch [4]Digimind [5]Talkwalker [6]Synthesio [7]Ipsos)

While Synthesio is a company under Ipsos, it’s mentioned significantly less frequently compared to its competitors, indicating that the impact of syndication is relatively small. However, based on its top-mentioned keywords, it can be implied that Synthesio’s target audience is more concentrated on topics like data, insights, branding, etc., which are more related to the company’s primary services compared to its competitors.

Emotional Attitude Analysis
Then, the attitude of each company’s target audience is analyzed by identifying the emotional aspect of each keyword (especially emphasizing the positive rate each company receives). The charts below present the rate of the target audience’s emotional attitude toward the 7 most frequently mentioned companies in the US on Twitter. (From left to right, top to bottom, we have [1]NetBase Quid [2]Sprinklr [3]Brandwatch [4]Digimind [5]Talkwalker [6]Synthesio [7]Ipsos)

Compared to NLP part I, Synthesio isn’t mentioned as frequently as its competitors, but its positive rate ranked in the 3rd place among the 7 companies; Sprinklr is most frequently mentioned among the 7 companies, while its positivity rate stands in the middle of the ranking. One aspect worth mentioning is that the positive rate of Synthesio is higher than Ipsos, meaning that the target audience’s attitude towards Synthesio isn’t affected by Ipsos.

Analysis On The Impact Of Synthesio And Its Competitors On Linkedin.

To fully investigate how the target communities discuss Synthesio and competitors on social channels, their LinkedIn data is collected and analyzed including the frequency of posts, media type(engagement), and followers to evaluate the topic from another perspective, thus discussing it more thoroughly.

Frequency Of Posts

Media Engagement And Followers

- Even though Synthesio has the least amount of followers, the percentage of likes from its most popular post by total followers is around 0.7% which exceeds both Ipsos (0.2%) and Sprinklr (0.14%), inferring that Synthesio’s target communities of interest are more engaged with the company and more active on Linkedin.

- Synthesio posts the most articles among the 7 companies, while Ipsos and Sprinklr mainly use other methods such as polls, shared posts, etc to interact with the audience. It’s interesting to notice that the most interacted post of Synthesio is a shared post with a topic on “top 10 celebrity-owned makeup brands by online conversation volume” with 79 likes, 3 comments, and 6 reposts.

- Understanding Consistency in Quality of Interaction, we find that Digimind has a relatively consistent engagement over LinkedIn Posts while the range is higher for Synthesio and Brandwatch.

Recommendation On Next Steps

The following suggestions are made based on the analysis of interaction level, competitors, sentiments, and talking points across Synthesio’s major social platforms:

Conclusion

- Given that Synthesio has better engagement than others, it should distribute the content in sync with purchase cycles of individual industries while creating content customized to purchase decision makers simultaneously.

- Since prescriptive posts around insights and data-driven marketing are well-received by Synthesio consumers, focusing on prescriptive content rather than trend analysis would allow Synthesio to stand apart from the competition. This can act as guidelines of content mix over the years to maintain the consistency of engagement over the period and it should also be in sync with the client’s purchase cycle.

- On top of that, it can be inferred from the report that the impact of syndication is relatively small. Therefore, it’s crucial to syndicate the LinkedIn content and Twitter articles from Synthesio with Ipsos to increase reach with articles around topics that interest the target community.

- As for LinkedIn specifically, even though Synthesio posts more articles compared to its competitors, it’s necessary to develop content with mixed media (polls, videos, speech, and panel discussions) and to plan periodic content distribution to optimize media engagement.