Your team spent 3 weeks on that new ad.
2 rounds on copy. A brand review. Legal approval. A 45-min debate about whether the button should say “Get started” or “Start free.”
Then, a day after it went live, a stranger in the comments described your product better than the ad did. In 1 sentence. With a typo.
Now, plot twist: I actually LOVE when this happens.
Because, that comment is a customer taking time out of their day to tell you, in their own words, what your product does, and why they bought (or didn’t). And their language was probably clearer than any ad you’ve run this year.
THIS is why, if I could only track 1 metric about on social media, it wouldn’t be followers or engagement rate. It would be what people say about my brand when I’m not part of the conversation.
Your comment section, and every piece of social content about your category and your competitors you’re not tagged in, is priceless business intelligence.
So: how do you make sure the whole business starts listening to it?
1st, a quick definition:
What Social Intelligence Means (Plain English Translation)
There’s a name for taking all these social signals and using them to make better business decisions: social intelligence.
People are constantly telling you what they like, what they hate, what they wish existed, and what they’d be willing to pay for.
The hard part is figuring out which signals matter. (More on that later.)
BTW, social intelligence =/= traditional research. I liked how Paige Walker from The Hershey Company explained it in Sprout Social’s 2026 Social Intelligence Report: “A survey is guided by a researcher; on social, they’re freely sharing their feelings.”
Sprout surveyed 705 social & Marketing professionals for the report, and basically everyone (93%) understands WHY social intelligence is important for future growth.
But acting on it is another story:
→ Only 10% said their org can act on a social insight within hours.
→ And 86% said they’ve missed opportunities because social insights were delayed, siloed, or underused.
So, let’s fix that.
Today, we’re getting into 4 ways to start acting on social signals this week (including how to tell a real shift from internet noise), why asking ChatGPT won’t work, and my picks for the Social Intelligence Summit sessions to watch 1st, including a keynote from a friend you might recognize…
But first, the problem.
Your Social Signals Need to Escape Your Marketing Team
We’ve gotten really good at collecting Marketing data. I’m not convinced we’ve gotten equally good at knowing what to do with it. Social data is the ultimate example of this problem.
If the same frustration starts appearing across Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, and your competitors’ comment sections, someone at your company should hear about it + act on it. NOT just the social media manager.
Your product team should get the feature requests. PR will want the first hint of a reputation problem. Sales needs the exact reason a buyer picked someone else, and your CMO should know exactly when the conversation about your brand starts to shift.
But in Sprout’s research, only 36% of leaders say their social data regularly informs decisions outside of Marketing. Only 28% say their product team actively uses social insights. For R&D, it’s 18%. 😬😬😬
4 Ways to Get Social Moving This Week
If your attempts to raise a flag keep getting lost in a monthly report, or a Slack message with 2 👀 reactions and no follow-up, here’s what to do next ⤵️
1️⃣. Sort the signal from the noise.
Sometimes the internet is loud for 48 hours and then forgets whatever it was upset about. Before you panic-react, ask 2 questions: is this showing up on more than 1 platform? And, is it coming from your customers, or people who were never going to buy?
The social leads at Ogilvy and Zalando dug into this in their panel at Sprout’s Summit.
🧪 TRY THIS: Automate a running doc of repeat complaints and requests. Act on easy ones the same day. Escalate the bigger asks (like product changes) once signals show up in 2+ places.
2️⃣. Give every insight a destination.
An insight nobody can act on is trivia. Before you share something, decide which team needs it AND which decision it could change. “Customers keep asking for a cheaper plan” goes straight to whoever owns pricing, screenshots attached. (Dropping it in #general just means 40 people can ignore it at once.)
3️⃣. Write your plays before you need them.
Sprout’s executive brief recommends pre-approved response plays: decisions you make ahead of time that outline what happens when a specific kind of signal shows up, so your team can act WITHOUT waiting on 4 layers of approval.
🧪 TRY THIS: If complaints about 1 feature spike, make sure support has a reply ready, and that it gets into product’s queue the same day.
4️⃣. Turn their words into your copy.
Remember the stranger who out-wrote your ad? That phrasing = free creative research. Words customers use to describe your product are usually plainer and more convincing than the ones in your messaging doc.
🧪 TRY THIS: Once a month, pull the 10 comments that describe your product best. Test 1 of them, word for word, as your next ad headline.
👉 If you want a head start, Sprout’s Social Signal Playbook is free.
It includes a masterclass AND a ready-made deck template for presenting what you find (plus a bonus AI prompt library).
Hold Up, Can’t ChatGPT/Claude do this?
I know a lot of us have gotten cool results asking AI to find patterns in a bunch of exported social comments.
AI can analyze a spreadsheet, no problem. The problem is making sure you’re feeding the RIGHT data to AI in the 1st place, in real time.
Connections between social networks and AI tools mostly show you your own brand’s data, like post metrics & ad results, rather than the conversations happening about you (directly or indirectly) across the platform.
But without eyes on category conversations, changes over time, or discussions where nobody tagged you, you’re only getting a tiny slice of the picture.
That’s where tools like Sprout Social become useful. They bring social listening, analytics, and AI-powered analysis together so teams can identify patterns across more than just their own posts. Their AI agent Trellis works from the broader conversation, alongside your posts.
Of course, someone still has to decide what the insights mean. That part’s yours. It’s also the #1 topic I was searching for when Sprout Social told me about its Social Intelligence Summit.
Speaking of people with opinions about Marketing…
What to Watch From Sprout’s Social Intelligence Summit
Sprout hosted their Social Intelligence Summit on October 29, and the recordings are officially up. Here’s my watch list:
1️⃣. The Proof is in the Signal: My Bathroom Break co-host Jay Schwedelson delivered the opening keynote, so I GOTTA mention him. But also, his session was genuinely killer. It’s all about what’s changed in social and why brands now treat it as a foundation for the whole business. Jay and I disagree on plenty, but we agree on this one. I won’t recap it here – you should hear it from him. 💕
2️⃣. First to Know, First to Move: Josh Rangel from Ogilvy and Tulani André from Zalando on spotting real shifts early and telling them apart from passing trends. If you want to know how to separate real signals from random internet noise, this is where to start.
3️⃣. From Signals to Strategy: Paige Walker from Hershey and Bianca Shaw explain why good insights stall before they ever reach a decision, and what it takes to get them acted on.
Your Next Socially-Intelligent Step
Your dashboard can tell you how many people saw an ad. But the social conversation is where you find out what they really WANT.
Impressions and engagements obviously matter. But if I had to walk into a meeting with my CMO tomorrow, I’d much rather tell them something new about our customers than that our engagement rate increased by 12%.
1 might get me a “nice job!” from the team.
The other might change what the company does next.
That’s social intelligence.
Ready to get your intel operation off the ground?
Sprout has 2 resources I’d recommend: the 2026 Social Intelligence Report for the research, and the Summit recordings to hear experts talk through how they’re approaching it.
I’m more of a listener myself, so I’d start with Jay’s keynote.
