A Five-Step Framework for Turning Social Data Into Content People Share

This five-step content framework — Be Curious, Investigate, Relate, Create, Repeat — turns raw social listening data into content audiences actually share.

Do you stare at your social listening dashboard and feel more overwhelmed than inspired? You are not alone. Our August Expert Webinar, featuring award-winning brand storyteller Suki Ilotario and Daniella Sampson, Pendulum's Head of Marketing, dove into a topic every content creator needs to understand.

How do you turn raw social signal into content that connects? The conversation kept circling back to one idea that is worth sitting with.

"I like to think of social media as a telephone, not a megaphone," Suki said early in the session.

That single line reframes almost everything else in this piece. If social is a two-way conversation, then the job of a content marketer is not to shout louder. It is to listen better, notice the human story beneath the noise, then respond in a way that feels like a real reply rather than a broadcast.

Here is how to turn that idea into a repeatable framework.

Why the Data Can Feel Overwhelming (and why that is okay)

Daniella opened the session with a scenario most content strategists know well. A global event happens, like the FIFA World Cup, and leadership wants content, fast. The pressure to jump in is immense, and the numbers behind it are genuinely staggering.

Pulling from a 7-day snapshot of Pendulum data during the tournament, the conversation and referenced examples included over 40 million engagements across the period, and a striking anomaly on TikTok: just 4,600 posts generated more than 145 million impressions.

Numbers like that can make anyone freeze. Where do you even start? Some brands nailed the moment during the World Cup. Others blended into the noise or, worse, stumbled into backlash by leaning into cultural or political territory without thinking it through. Big moments like this need a process for deciding how to show up, especially when everyone else is trying to speak at once.

That process is exactly what they walked through next.

Start With Instinct, Not Data

When Daniella polled the live audience about where their best content ideas come from, gut instinct and creativity scored high, while data and analytics came in surprisingly low. Suki's response to that was refreshing.

"It really does begin with the instincts," she said. "The best ideas come from trusting myself... and then I'm going to back it with the data."

This flips the narrative that many marketers have absorbed over the past few years: the idea that everything has to start with a spreadsheet. Suki's approach is the opposite. Start with curiosity and gut feeling, then use data to validate, refine, and strengthen the idea, not to generate it from scratch.

She also pushed back hard on the instinct to kill ideas before they even get a chance.

"There are no bad ideas," she said. "We're judging ourselves before we've even let the idea get out the door."

If you have ever sat in a brainstorm and watched a genuinely fun idea get talked to death before anyone tried it, this will resonate. This is analysis paralysis, and it is one of the biggest silent killers of good content!

The five-step loop that should be followed for strong content is:

This is the real backbone of the conversation, and it is worth screenshotting (which is literally what Daniella told the live audience to do).

Step One: Get Curious

This step is simple in concept, but hard to do: show up daily and pay attention. Suki noted that her own routine for staying close to what people are saying is doom-scrolling TikTok, reading industry news on LinkedIn, and flipping through Instagram carousels.

You need to be able to hear, see, and read the good, the bad, and the ugly when monitoring your brand, because complaints or confusion are as useful for content ideas as praise is.

We recommend widening the scope of who is in the room during this stage. It does not have to be just the social strategist. Designers, copywriters, and community managers all notice different things, and bringing those perspectives together gives you a broader picture, often with better context, before you move to the next step.

Step Two: Investigate

Once you have a pile of raw signals, it is time to become Sherlock Holmes.

"What's the story underneath the story underneath the story?" Suki asked.

Here is where you take everything you gathered in step one and start looking for patterns, deeper meaning, and alignment with your brand's values. Skip what just feels trendy in the moment. Jumping on a trend just because everyone else is doing it, without checking whether it fits your brand, is exactly how brands end up on the wrong side of an audience, especially with Gen Z, who will cancel you very fast.

This is the stage where brand safety and PR alignment matter most. Daniella pointed to real examples from the World Cup, like brands obscuring their own logos in a trend that made them unrecognizable, or brands leaning into moments that turned out to be more politically charged than expected. Her advice is to ask a simple but powerful question before you post: 

What could go wrong here, and is the trend worth the risk?

Step Three: Find the Relatability

Here is the most quietly important step in the whole framework, and it was Daniella's favorite.

Suki explained it through her lens as a millennial mom. Any content that taps into 90s nostalgia or "you know you were a kid of the 80s when" pulls her in immediately, not because of the topic itself, but because it signals that someone understands her specific experience.

"If you're talking to everyone, you're talking to no one," she said.

The practical advice is to find a thread that resonates and then keep pulling it. If millennial mom content is working, do not follow it up with content aimed at a completely different audience. Consistency in who you are talking to builds a following that knows what to expect from you. That predictability is part of what earns repeat engagement.

This step is directly connected to platform strategy. The same core idea can become:

•  A carousel on Instagram
• A 15-second video on TikTok
• A graphic with a long caption on LinkedIn. 

Each platform has its own language, and relatability often depends on speaking that language fluently rather than cross-posting the same asset everywhere.

Step Four: Get Creative

Now, let's get to the fun part. This step is called get creative!

This starts with repurposing older content. For example, Suki has a personal blog with 150 posts going back over a decade, and she regularly feeds old posts into AI tools to generate new videos, graphics, and captions. It is a good idea to regularly review older posts and see if you can refresh, re-use or repurpose the content.

That is a genuinely useful mindset shift for lean teams. Old content is not dead content; rather, it is raw material. There is also the danger of over-engineering, i.e., editing a piece of content so many times that you strip out the very thing that made it feel real and worth posting in the first place. Not every piece of content has to be perfect; it just has to be done as best you can.

On AI, their take was balanced and worth repeating for any team currently building their own guidelines. AI is a tool for efficiency, not a replacement for creativity or the human touch, and transparency about how and when it is used matters for maintaining trust with your audience.

Step Five: Watch and Repeat

The framework closes with measurement, but not in a cold, purely numerical way.

"Your last social post is a great source of insight," she said. "Did it do well? Did it not do well? Did people share it?"

Saves and shares stand out as particularly meaningful signals, more so than raw likes, because they indicate someone valued the content enough to keep it or pass it along. Over time, this creates a feedback loop where you are training yourself and, in a sense, training your audience. You are learning when and how to show up in a way that consistently performs.

She also offered something that content marketers rarely hear stated this plainly: it is okay to stop doing something that is not working. If a content thread or an influencer partnership isn't resonating, that doesn't mean you failed. It means you have new information you can use.

Handling Multiple Campaigns at Different Speeds

One of the sharpest points in the webinar concerned the simultaneous management of reactive content and long-term campaigns. Content leaders treat them differently on purpose. Timely, trend-driven content needs to move through the five steps quickly, sometimes skipping deep investigation in favor of speed. Evergreen or seasonal campaigns, on the other hand, deserve the slower version of the process, built out over weeks or months with more scrutiny.

This is content agility, i.e., knowing which speed a given piece of content calls for, rather than applying the same pace to everything.

Speaking to More Than One Audience Without Losing Anyone

A great question from the live audience: What do you do when your followers span very different groups, say millennial moms, Gen Z, and an older generation, all in the same feed? 

The answer? Lean into platform-specific slices of the same core content rather than trying to write one post that speaks to everyone.

Younger audiences might get a fast, 15-second TikTok cut. Older audiences may get a curated Instagram carousel or a longer, text-rich Facebook caption. This is the same core idea, different delivery, matched to where each group spends their time.

The Trust Argument for Organic Content

Toward the end of the session, Daniella asked the question every social strategist eventually has to answer for leadership: what happens when organic content is expected to tie back to revenue? 

Suki connects organic content most directly to retention and trust, arguing that the value it builds is real even when it is harder to put a dollar figure next to it.

When customers turn to your social channels with questions and get silence, that erodes trust in a way that shows up in the numbers, even if it isn't immediately traceable in a single campaign report.

The Content Marketer Take-Away

If there is one thread running through this entire conversation, it is that data and creativity are partners in the same process. 

1. Curiosity gets you close to your audience. 
2. Investigation keeps you aligned with your values and out of avoidable trouble.
3. Relatability makes the content land. 
4. Creative play is where the actual craft happens. 
5. Watching what performs turns every post into information you can use for the next one.

None of this requires a massive team. Suki has been a party of one more times than she can count, and the framework holds up.

The next time a big cultural moment hits, and someone on your team asks how to respond, you have a five-step answer that goes beyond throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks.

Watch the Full Webinar Here.

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