With almost 4 billion social media users around the world and counting in 2020, much of our lives are documented across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.

Our social interactions, hobbies, and personality can all be used as convenient assets to insurance agencies looking to learn more about their customers and current trends.

A study conducted by the University of Cambridge found that in some cases, people’s “likes” on Facebook, more accurately predicted some future behaviors than a well-designed questionnaire.

With over 69% of Americans active on Facebook in 2019, agencies are realizing how powerful and useful a simple “like” can be to tailor their offerings to meet evolving preferences.

Social media offers a lot of new insight and information for insurance agents to learn from.

Especially when it comes to their own customers.

Using information from social media accounts, which often include photos and detailed captions, can be of great use to agents and adjusters in the decision-making process.

Oftentimes, people are more truthful and honest on their own Facebook page when they believe people other than friends and family won’t ever see what they post.

For example, a person may have posted a photo of their torn-up wind sail that eventually led to windsurfing accident.

Social media is a public platform and provides basic and helpful facts and often evidence surrounding an event, or a claim being made.

See also: The Influence Of Social Media in Today’s Culture

Other than using social media evidence to learn basic, public information about a customer, agencies can use the analytics to know what the word is out on the street about them and their competition.

Who loves your company and why?

Who hates it and why?

Who loves the product and process but hates the service?

These details can make a significant difference in an agency’s approach to branding and enhancing their experience with customers.

SMA, or Social Media Analysis, is a growing market in the insurance industry.

To be clear, agencies aren’t just snooping around the profiles of their customers.

SMA requires active participation on social media to work best.

Companies create their own Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn pages to proactively market towards their audience to receive reactions.

These reactions along with their presence online, allows people to directly or indirectly convey their thoughts and ideas about companies, which are then used towards analysis of the company, services, or products used.

Check it out: How To Automate Your Business Processes: The Software You Should Be Using

Every agency has their own reasons for conducting a social media analysis, but these are some of ways your company can get the most out of an SMA.

1. Getting a Leg Up On the Competition

A little understanding goes a long way.

In this case, listening to what the customers have to say on their own time about your service or product, and what problems they may be facing with your product, can give you a competitive advantage.

For most companies, this type of insight is often missing.

While you’re at it, you can learn what your competitors are up to.

See what their own customers have to say about their product and compare it to yours.

Learn from their successes and mistakes and apply it to bettering your own brand.

2. Listen and Learn

Social platforms give people the opportunity to communicate and share information.

Because of this, companies often find themselves competing with their own customers for problem solving solutions and advice.

Between comments or messages and online forums, consumers are able to swap information about products or services they have in common to help solve an issue or answer a question another customer may not be able to find on the company FAQ or help page.

When companies check out these avenues of communication, they will learn more about the issues and challenges or tips and tricks that their customer base is communicating about.

 Check it out: 6 Reasons Your Employees Should Use Social Media

3. Improve Your Product and Service

Customers are often more inclined to tweet, comment, message, or blog about their negative experience with an agency’s product or service than the good experiences.

Although this sounds bad, it can be a great learning experience for your agency.

Read through all of those comments and try to put together solutions to remedy the challenges customers face.

Make your services better by working out the kinks that customers feel exist.

 See also: EVERY DAY I’M BUFFERIN’: THE BENEFITS OF CONDUCTING A SPEED TEST

4. Effective Marketing Efforts

An SMA is proven to be an especially useful marketing tool when used to optimize the efforts of companies.

Social media provides agencies with timely information on demographics and characteristics for their service and usage.

Internet-based marketing campaigns can be based off of these pieces of information.

5. Innovation

Some SMA tools can provide deeper language processing analysis of social media.

These tools are used to fill in capability gaps that customers often find in a service or product.

Using this type of user feedback can help your agency develop innovative ways of approaching insurance or create more innovative offers.

Being able to use this type of tool and understand how to process it to move forward, makes the difference between an innovator and a laggard in the insurance technology industry.

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