If you talk to any number of random individuals on the street, you will find out that many of them are using a number of different dating apps. This is an industry that is booming and is also a fairly crowded marketplace already. We often see this with our customers who in industries or have products that have many competitors that offer similar services. These customers are always trying to find ways to distinguish themselves and figure out how they stack up against their competitors. For us, we think that the best way to answer this question is to turn to Social Listening.

There are a number of ways to better understand your industry, your placement in the industry and how you can use Social Data that you glean from Social Listening to help you stand out from your competitors. To help illustrate this, I decided to look at that incredibly busy market of dating apps, and I will be looking at three main data points that a good Social Listening tool can provide you with: Share of Voice (brand awareness), a Social Reputation Score (brand reputation) and a Brand Differentiator.

Dating Apps: Brand Awareness

The Share of Voice is a Social Listening measurement that tells you how much of the online conversation around your industry revolves around you and your competitors respectively.

As you can see above, Tinder dominates online conversation around popular dating sites, with Match a distant second, but also far ahead of the next most buzzed about site, Bumble. This is a helpful way to understand your brand awareness as the share of voice provides a clear understanding of a brand or product’s place in the competitive landscape. If you have strong brand awareness then you will have a strong share of voice as your audience will be talking about you often.

Dating Apps: Brand Reputation Compared

The share of voice only tells part of the story, as you might have a high share of voice, but that doesn’t mean that the buzz you’re creating is positive. You need a metric that can give you a better understanding of where you truly rank, and how that compares with your competitors. Synthesio’s Social Reputation Score (SRS) uses Social Listening to measure customer experience and predict business growth based on upward trends in overall social health. Each brand or product’s SRS is based on the influence metric SynthesioRank and overall sentiment generated within the dataset. Synthesio’s SRS gives you a score between 0-100. So what does this really mean?

As you can see above, while Tinder dominated share of voice, when other metrics were factored in (including sentiment, influence ratings and overall volume), Tinder isn’t even in the top five, meanwhile a less buzzworthy site like Zoosk actually has a much better social reputation than it’s competitors. This is why it is crucial to use all aspects of your Social Listening tool so that you can see the whole picture when you look at the Social Data, and not just bits and pieces that can be taken out of context.

Dating Apps: What Does Your Audience Say?

An effective Social Listening tool will be able to give you deep insights into your audience, this is something that is crucial for so many reasons, but probably one of my favorite aspects of this is being able to hear directly from the people who interact with, and use, your brand or products and better understand how they view it. Every brand has its own messaging and tries to differentiate itself from its competitors, but at the end of the day, if your audience doesn’t think that there are any differentiators, then your messaging doesn’t matter. This is why every brand needs to use Social Listening to listen to how their audience differentiates them from their competitors, and then build messaging around those differentiators.

Trying to succeed and compete in a crowded field is always difficult, whether you are trying to help people find love, create a new beverage or build the next billion-dollar start-up, the best way to stand out and take control of a crowded marketplace is to use Social Listening to help utilize Social Data in your branding. If you want to know more about how Synthesio’s Social Listening tool can help you stand out, request a demo and see for yourself how you can use Social Data to your benefit.