This post was created in partnership with Brandwatch
Marketing data exploded when traditional search engines took over the internet, providing brands with fresh insights into consumer interests and habits. But times have changed, and another kind of search is becoming more powerful for brands: social media.
During a Social Media Week session co-hosted with Brandwatch, Eric deLima Rubb, VP of customer success and insights, discussed how social search provides more detail into consumer decision-making and how brands can leverage this information to better understand purchasing trends.
The gap between traditional and social search
Rubb began by defining how consumers use traditional search engines to find facts about upcoming purchases. He gave an example of buying a car and how a buyer might search, “Is a Honda CR-V an all-wheel drive car?” The search engine will simply return a fact as an answer: Yes.
According to Rubb, 82% of traditional search results are people looking for facts like specs, prices, features, and dimensions.
Social search, however, provides a more robust picture of the same car buyer because the buyer is using social media to ask their community for advice about specific questions. Using the car example, he highlighted a social media post of someone who went shopping for a car and how the dealer tried to convince them to buy the 2025 model instead of waiting for the 2026 redesign. In their post, the buyer was asking the community if the dealer could be trusted, which therefore gave a deeper picture of what the buyer was really thinking.
“Search shows you questions that people can answer with a fact,” Rubb explained. “Social search shows you questions that other people need help answering.”
Rubb calls this the “critical gap” for brands and agencies.
“If you’re not designing engagement messaging and strategy to address this kind of comparative shopping, then you’re missing an opportunity to engage with the community voice,” he shared. “The gap is not volume. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the psychological and emotional drivers into how people make decisions.”
A new way to describe the consumer’s journey
Rubb and his team came up with a new phrase to describe the consumer’s journey along social search: visible evaluation journeys through community interaction.
“We call it visible because you can see it—it’s in public. We call it evaluation because, yes, it’s opinion seeking, but it’s also decisions. They are journeys because you can track them like a story. And it’s community because it’s people with people. It’s not someone alone in a search bar somewhere,” he explained.
