Pod Insights MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth Social Disconnect Between Brands & Consumers About this episode Social media creates a disconnect between brands and consumers. Scott Morris, CMO at Sprout Social, shares research revealing how consumers use social platforms as discovery engines and customer service channels. Brands must balance cultural relevance without chasing every trend, maintain platform diversification to reach audiences authentically, and deliver personalized interactions within 24 hours to prevent customers from switching to competitors. Show Notes Connect With:Scott Morris: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iHereEverything.com.
0:25 Speaker 01 From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55% to 65% open rate.
0:36 Speaker 02 Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
0:42 Speaker 03 Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.
0:46 Speaker 01 If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.
0:53 Speaker 00 Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
1:15 Speaker 04 As marketers, we rely on social media for three reasons: to share our brands with the world, to maintain a line of communications with our customers, and to understand the culture impacting our business. But finding the balance between social media as a marketing channel and understanding how consumers want to engage is an ongoing challenge. I'm Benjamin Shapiro, and joining me to discuss the difference between what marketers think and what consumers actually want from social media is Scott Morris. Scott is the Chief Marketing Officer at Sprouts Social, which is a social media management and analytics platform. And his team recently surveyed a group of customers, social practitioners, and marketing
1:56 Speaker 04 leaders to uncover how consumer relationships are changing and how that's different than what social media platforms want. And today, we're going to discuss those findings and how marketers can break through the noise. All right, Scott, welcome to the Martech Podcast. Thank you so much.
2:12 Speaker 05 It's great to be here.
2:13 Speaker 04 Very excited to have you here. Excited to talk about the gap between social marketing from the brand perspective and what consumers actually want. You did the research. You published the Sprout Social Index Survey for 2025. What were you trying to learn by conducting your research?
2:31 Speaker 05 So as you said earlier, the research actually goes out to consumers. It goes out to social practitioners, meaning people who work in social media every day, and then to marketing leaders. And really, the goal was to uncover the latest trends in social culture and really try to predict brand implications for the future. And specifically, our goal is to determine what consumers want to see from brands on social media so that marketers can better understand what will resonate most with them this year. And but also helps reveal how relationships between social media and online culture are changing and provides insights
3:12 Speaker 05 into how brands can then leverage this when they're actually creating and executing their strategies in social.
3:18 Speaker 04 All right. So you're talking about how social media is changing. Where did we start prior to your research? What were some of the common table stakes, things that we know about social media? And then how has it evolved?
3:31 Speaker 05 I mean, things that we know about social media. We know that obviously, the the social trend has been growing for the last 15 years or so, with more and more networks coming up all of the time. We also know that it's traditionally a place where people go to have conversations, kind of started with more friendship connections and things like that. But increasingly, we know that it's actually a place where people go to connect with brands and to connect with businesses and to sort of also seek out a lot of information, depending on what they might be looking for at the time. I think that the way that the research is telling us, like some of the most interesting findings in terms of how consumers are actually using social media, I think there's probably three big takeaways
4:14 Speaker 05 in the research itself. The first one really is around what people are using social media for today, which is that, interestingly, it's the Number one source that people are using, consumers are using to keep up with trends and online culture. And that might not be really surprising, but I think what surprised me was that it actually is number one over friends and family, over TV, over streaming and over all other digital sources. So we really have seen this demonstrate sort of how paramount social media has become in terms of not only how we stay connected to each other, but how we stay connected to what's going on in the world.
4:55 Speaker 04 It's replaced the water cooler, essentially.
4:57 Speaker 05 Well, it has. And you know what else it's starting to replace? Or maybe replace isn't the best word, maybe compliment in a really significant way, is search and discovery. Social media has become a primary search engine for consumers. I mean, I think platforms like TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, those actually are where people go to discover, to learn, and of course, also to make decisions, including purchasing decisions. This didn't come from our research, but I've seen this stat a bunch of times, that TikTok is actually the number one search destination for Gen Z now. And number two is YouTube. This shift, I think, provides a really great opportunity for brands, but it does require kind of a new approach. And social
5:42 Speaker 05 is really, really emerging as a discovery engine. But also, at the same time, we have this thing happening where AI is reshaping search. And you've probably heard a lot about this.
5:52 Speaker 04 Hang on, before we get into AI, because I do want to ask about that, I want to double click into the difference between a couple of different social channels, because I think that's relevant for understanding the changes in behavior from browse to search. I think that most of us probably think of social media as a browsing experience. I'm going onto my feed, I've curated it, so I have either a list of topics or relationships, accounts that I follow, and I can browse through them to see what's happening in the world. And now you're saying, okay, well, actually TikTok is like a search engine as much as it is a permissionless content delivery engine. I'm too young for that, right? I'm not personally going into TikTok and being like, you know what I want to learn about? Tell me about the trends
6:37 Speaker 04 in marketing. People are actually just being like, here's basically a keyword, I'm putting it into TikTok, and now I'm, I'm learning about the, the subject. Is that actually a regular user behavior?
6:47 Speaker 05 100%. Now, maybe not for your generation or my generation.
6:53 Speaker 04 God, I feel old.
6:54 Speaker 05 I know, I think we're about the same, but definitely if you're Gen Z, those are the places you go first. You go directly to your social networks to start your search, to start your discovery. And then I think there are other examples, Reddit is a good example, where you might not go there first to start your search, but if you go to a place like Google and you search increasingly, it's actually Reddit that's showing up as a key search destination. So whatever you're searching for, you are then driven into a social media network to actually get that answer or dig deeper into the question that you asked. So it is definitely what is happening today. And then Gen Z is doing it today. The
7:39 Speaker 05 future generations, millennials, Gen X, they're going to be following. So it's a trend that if you're a brand, you really need to follow and you really need to care about.
7:47 Speaker 04 To me, that's one of the most interesting takeaways is that social media is no longer a browse, permissionless content delivery engine. It's less passive than how I think of it and more active with, I am looking for a very specific engine. I think I would separate YouTube, which I think of very much as a video search engine. And now it seems like the other social networks are getting into the search game as well. Talk to me about some of the other findings that you found. You mentioned AI. What did you learn about that?
8:17 Speaker 05 That's always an interesting thing, right? Because with AI, there's two different ways of looking at that. There's AI from a consumer's perspective and there's AI from a brand perspective. And AI can definitely help marketers. It can help provide timely, personalized responses. It can help them sift through massive amounts of social data. But I think that for a consumer, they're a little bit split in terms of how they see AI. And again, it's generational. Generally, they want to know when something is AI, but the younger the person is, like if they're from Gen Z, for example, they're much more open to AI, which even includes things like AI influencers, and they're very, very open to that.
8:54 Speaker 04 That's an interesting trend and I keep seeing ironically LinkedIn posts about synthetic social media, which is AI influencers that are not actually people, experiences that are image created that represent what people might want to see or feel, but it's not the real world. I don't know if you have benchmarks or practices, but like, how big of a deal is this notion of synthetic social?
9:18 Speaker 05 It's a pretty small deal today that we think will be a really big deal in the future. This particular research didn't actually drill into that. And so I don't really have any benchmark data that we can show, but we know that this is another one of those trends that is just becoming more and more prevalent, where there are some really bigger, becoming more well-known influencers or creators who aren't real people at all. They are absolutely manufactured and everything that they're doing is completely AI-generated. But it's pretty upfront, I think, today for examples like that. And I think the concerns that a lot of people, including most consumers, have is just really wanting to understand when it's AI and when it's not. A lot of people don't have any problem when it's AI. They just want that transparency and they want to know.
10:03 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think that's where the lines get gray is there's entirely AI imagery and then there's mostly AI imagery. And I think it'll be harder and harder to distinguish as the tools get richer. Going back and talking about your study, I want to talk a little bit about the rules of engagement and understanding what consumers actually want from brands. Talk to me about the difference between what brands are thinking and then what consumers actually want, focusing on the consumers first.
10:30 Speaker 05 Sure. So what our research showed us is that what consumers want from brands is they want really quick, but personalized communications. And in particular, when they're looking for an answer from a brand, when they're basically using social media as an outlet for customer service. About two-thirds, I don't remember the exact number, but around two-thirds of the consumer respondents say that they'll basically purchase products from a competitor if a brand doesn't respond on social media. I mean, it really is, and is increasing. Becoming a go to channel for customer service. So responding to customers online is no longer optional. And timeliness really is key there.
11:12 Speaker 05 Three quarters or so of the users expect that response within 24 hours. So that's one of the big areas in terms of how consumers, what their expectations are from brands. And I think another one is that as customer care standards continue to sort of elevate, brands need to really double down on those interactions. And that means really investing in the right tools and developing the right processes and having the right frameworks in place to really make timely, meaningful engagement possible. And so brands who succeed on social will be those that really can humanize themselves with relatable and helpful interactions with those consumers. I mean, I think the bottom line is you need to be able to deliver personalized
11:57 Speaker 05 interactions with customers on social, and that really is no longer a nice to have, right? It's like a strategic imperative now that needs to be part of your marketing strategy.
12:06 Speaker 04 It's interesting, when you're talking about how consumers want to engage with brands, it seems like the answer is it's about customer service. I want to be able to publicly gripe about my experience and then have a real person cuddle me until I feel better about the experience and provide an immediate resolution. So I am seen, heard, and my problem is resolved.
12:29 Speaker 05 I think that's partially true.
12:30 Speaker 04 I did it this weekend. I bought a grill from Traeger and it's less than a year old and it didn't work. Sorry, Traeger. After eight hours on customer service, text messaging back and forth with them, I hadn't resolved the issue. So I went to Twitter and was like, hey, this experience stinks. And then somebody got back to me and I got a phone number and then they sent me a new part. Wonderful. Great experience. I feel seen, Traeger. It only took eight hours for you to see me and help me solve the problem. But look, we're all working through our own stuff.
12:58 Speaker 05 And the good news is they did actually get back to you, right? They did actually respond. I mean, what's the worst possible outcome is when you do something like that?
13:05 Speaker 04 I don't want to talk bad because I can make delicious food on that grill. And this is the first time it's broken and everybody gets a pass.
13:12 Speaker 05 They are good grills.
13:13 Speaker 04 That experience sucked. And maybe that's the one time that they get that one. What is interesting to me about how you said how consumers want to interact outside of my grill problems? You didn't say anything about marketing, right? It was all customer service. Hey, I want to interact with you where I am going to reach out and say, this is my problem. You solve it and we're going to do it in the public forum. And you didn't mention in the survey that consumers are saying, I want visibility. I want discoverability. I want content. I want education. And to me, that's like, as a marketer, what I think of first, social media, a channel where I can talk about my brand and say something interesting and hopefully be clever and funny.
13:54 Speaker 04 And build awareness, trust, purchase consideration, and even the down funnel stuff of clicks to the website, traffic, stuff that we actually count. Do consumers want that?
14:05 Speaker 05 Well, a hundred percent, right? And I think that's something brands really need to be thinking about is you have to be thinking about how to leverage social media throughout that entire customer journey. We talked already about the importance of social for search, right? For discoverability, either because people are driven there like Reddit through a search on something like Google, or because they start there like Gen Z does on Tik Tok and on other platforms, Instagram, et cetera. But then actually learning more about your products, learning more about your brand. That is obviously a big role of social media. And that is also where influencers can play a big role, or I really should say creators. They don't call themselves influencers. We call it influencer marketing, but creators themselves call themselves creators.
14:49 Speaker 05 And that also needs to be a big part of your strategy, which also helps with discoverability and broadening your reach.
14:54 Speaker 04 Totally semantic, but I have to cut you off. To me, creator is somebody that creates content. An influencer is somebody that creates content and has an audience that is consuming the content.
15:05 Speaker 05 That's true, but they're both creating content.
15:07 Speaker 04 Everybody is a creator that is publishing, but an influencer is one that has an audience big enough to actually influence and help a brand.
15:13 Speaker 05 I believe that's true, although I've also talked to some, I'm gonna use your term influencers, who have really large audiences. And when I call them an influencer, they say, I'm sorry, I call myself a creator.
15:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'm not an actor, I'm an artist. Okay, anyway, go on.
15:26 Speaker 05 Yeah, so really, it is that whole customer journey that you were talking about. I do think consumers have an expectation that brands are gonna show up in all of those ways for them. I happen to be focused a little more on the customer service side of it when we talked about it, just because that's an area that I think is probably growing the most. I think discoverability, and I think learning more about products and services, that's been around for a while, but increasingly, social is trending to be the number one place people are gonna go even to get that post-purchase help, like you talked about with your trigger grill, or fixing a problem.
15:59 Speaker 04 You're not wrong, and it's logical that the consumers, when asked, hey, how do you want to engage with brands, is their answer is, solve all my problems. Whenever I gripe, give me a hug and some new stuff. That's what I want. But in reality, what consumers are saying they want doesn't take into consideration, no one's gonna say, you know what I want? I want to be marketed to, and I want it to be easy to find you so I can make a decision on your product. But in reality, consumers are consuming, because that's what they do, they're consumers, the advertising in social media. My takeaway is, the notion of omnipresence is probably very important to the consumer, so they can find information about your brand, because there are so many social channels to go to,
16:43 Speaker 04 you need to be right-sized in each channel. And I think that that's probably something that is understated, but important to consumers.
16:51 Speaker 05 100% agree, and that came out loud and clear in the research as well. Consumers are present on all social media platforms. The research showed, no big surprise, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube were the most popular platforms across demographics, and then others like TikTok and X quickly follow. But again, if you look at this generationally, Facebook is not the number one network for Gen Z, you know, it's TikTok and Instagram. But a lot of them are still on Facebook as well, and you might argue some of them Are on there because they want to keep in touch with their grandparents or their parents or whatever it is, but they're there, they're present. And I think that's why for a brand, platform diversification is really, really crucial because you want to make sure that
17:36 Speaker 05 your brand is meeting your audiences where they are. And if you only serve Gen Z, if that's all you care about, then maybe you have the luxury of being on fewer of those networks or those platforms. But if you're a brand that really wants to serve all of those markets, then creating a really strong presence across those platforms is what will allow you to reach audiences in a way that feels authentic to them and on each network. Because as you know, each network feels very different from each other.
18:04 Speaker 04 This is going to end up being our social short for this episode, but I want you to social stereotype for a second here and give me the profiles of the various social networks and who are they most likely for? Like Snapchat millennials? Is that Gen Z? Where do the different social channels fit in?
18:23 Speaker 05 Facebook really is kind of your catchall. Facebook is great if you want to reach across generations, regardless of the type of content you're trying to deliver. I would say for something like TikTok, definitely obviously video focused. And when you really want to focus on Gen Z and want to focus on some younger audiences, I would say that for something like Instagram, that has a bit of a broader reach than something like TikTok. So still video centric and you're getting the Gen Z audience for sure, but you also are getting folks from some other generations there. X also actually has really broad reach. It's changed a lot in the last couple of years. A lot of conversations are happening on X. So if you care about things like social listening and how people are talking about your brand on social, X has a very, very high volume of conversations happening there.
19:06 Speaker 04 Let's flip this around and talk a little bit about brands. What do you think about the way that brands are using social media? And how is it most likely conflicting with what consumers actually want?
19:16 Speaker 05 So one thing that we found in this research is that I think the stat was ninety eight percent. Let's round that up. Let's say a hundred percent. A lot. That's a lot. Social media practitioners, meaning folks who do social media as a living, social media managers, et cetera, literally all of them, think that social content should keep up with online trends, that it should be very, very focused on staying up with the latest trends. But consumers are actually very split on whether brands should jump on every trend or not. About a third of them think that it's embarrassing when brands hop on viral trends. Yet, most of them do want brands to understand online culture.
20:00 Speaker 05 So the key is to balance these things. You want to stay culturally relevant while avoiding embarrassment. And really, the key to that is sort of awareness and understanding. Consumers aren't interested in brands who just churn out content in order to participate in every trend. They really would rather that brands deeply understand kind of the nuances of online culture as it specifically pertains to their interest. So I think that's one area where we saw a real difference between how brands are approaching this and sort of what consumers actually want. I think another area that came out of the research is just the importance to be really aware
20:41 Speaker 05 of potential burnout here. So we just talked about sort of chasing every trend. Social media managers, social media marketers, really feel like they have to be constantly in the know, and that can lead to burnout. Ninety four percent, I think it was, of social media folks think they need to be online twenty four seven to succeed, and part of that is because most of them also think they have to jump on every trend and replicate that with their brand. And while this aligns to what consumers do want, they want quick personalized interactions, right? You wanted a trigger to reply to your tweet or whatever it was right away. It also poses challenges for marketers who are really looking to be mindful on social media, setting boundaries and creating thoughtful, intentional content.
21:23 Speaker 05 And I think this is an area where not only is balance crucial, but we're going to talk about AI. Something like AI can definitely help. Technology can help.
21:30 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's interesting, the sort of concept of newsjacking where if you're a social media manager and you're thinking about how to get your brand out there, hopping on top of every story seems relevant, but it might not be interesting if I have a, I don't know, any sort of product. If I'm running a restaurant, I don't need to be talking about tariffs, right? That's just not necessary relevant. Actually, it's probably relevant to everybody because prices are going up, but maybe it's not something I'm using in my social media marketing. Can you think of other examples of brands that have been a little tone deaf, trying to do the sort of newsjacking always on social content?
22:06 Speaker 05 I'm not sure that I want to call out a specific brand by name, but I think we've all seen examples. They are a little bit cringe worthy. When you see a brand trying too hard to try to jump on the latest trend, I think a good example is all the TikTok sounds. You see brands all the time trying to replicate that. I even see creators, influencers, whatever word you want to use, trying to do that sometimes. And even when like the recording is out of sync, like the audio, then how they're trying to do the video. And it's just really, really cringe worthy. And I think it's because you see examples. I think Duolingo is one of the best examples. They're doing such amazing things on social and they're definitely trendjacking, but in a really good way. They're really setting trends themselves in a lot of ways. And sometimes people think that they have to replicate that, but that's not appropriate for every brand.
22:49 Speaker 04 My takeaway from our conversation is that there is a disconnect between what consumers want and what brands want. And if you ask a consumer how they want to engage with the brand in social media, it often has to do with the post-marketing engagements. It is customer service. It is immediacy in response and conversation, but they don't really think about the way that they want, or at least they don't vocalize the way that they want to be marketed to. And our job as marketers is to not only think about the customer experience when we are working with somebody that is engaging with our brand, but also how to get in front of them early. And there's this fine line between understanding what is culturally relevant for your brand and appropriate, and then just being everywhere
23:32 Speaker 04 all the time, which can lead to burnout for your social media marketing managers and that sort of ick factor of a brand trying to be and do too much. That wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks to Scott Morris from Sprout Social for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with Scott, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or you can read Sprout Social's research on consumer and marketing behavior by visiting their website, sproutsocial.com. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or follow us on YouTube. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
24:39 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast, an I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit ihereverything.com.
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