Around 59% of the world’s population are social media users, according to the latest reports. They spent up to 2 hours and 31 minutes on social media daily. The statistics show the growth and significance of social media today. Undoubtedly, the advent of social media has changed the way how brands approach marketing and promotion. Apart from promoting products or services, social media offers an amazing opportunity to understand the needs and expectations of the target group. In this blog, we talk about how you can use social media effectively for market research.
Defining Social Media Market Research
Social media market research refers to the process of gathering information about your target audience through social media platforms. Brands can analyze both historical data and real-time data to garner insights to understand the target market. They can gain insights about their audience by analyzing their likes, dislikes, and how they interact on social media platforms. Apart from the major platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc., marketers can understand consumer choices through forums, blogs, and customer review platforms as well.
What Are The Benefits of Social Media Market Research?
Market research is essential when you develop a marketing strategy. It provides critical information about what your target customers are expecting from your brand. Market research through social media is an affordable option for brands as they do not need to spend on conducting surveys. It becomes easy to understand the various trends and usage patterns in the entire industry through proper social media market research.
Another major advantage of social media market research is that people will more likely be open to the platform. They will share opinions more openly which will help you gather better insights. When you conduct market research in traditional methods like surveys, it will be generally done in a conditioned setting.
Furthermore, social media allows you to gain insights much faster than other market research methods. Therefore, it becomes easy to track the results and tweak your marketing strategy quickly. In social media, you need not have to ask questions always. Instead, you can monitor the social media behavior of your target group and understand the trends and patterns.
Market Insights Through Social Media
By the efficient use of social media, marketers can garner various information about their target group. Here are a few market insights that you can target by monitoring social media brand mentions.
Customer Expectations
These days customers often post about their expectations from a brand on social media. Therefore, social media listening can give you valuable insights into what your target customers expect from your brand. For example, if you are a café owner, you may find comments from your visitors asking for a new drink or dish. Or if you have a physical store, you may find comments from users asking for an online store.
Area For Improvement
Social media has become one of the reliable ways to understand what people dislike about your brand. Regardless of how well your brand is performing, there would always be consumers who are unhappy with your product or service. They may post negative comments about the brand on social media. Be it positive or negative, responding to brand mentions and comments would help in humanizing the brand. Moreover, negative comments help you identify areas for improvement in your product or service offerings.
Understand Market Trends
Monitoring social media platforms closely will let you understand what are the topics that will be trending soon. It will help you discover hot topics and develop content around it. It becomes easier to identify the topics that are relevant to your target group. This way, you can tweak your social media strategy and stay on top of the trends. It will help you improve customer engagement and build brand awareness. Trend research is not just for the marketing team but can benefit all other areas of the business.
Tips For Social Media Market Research
Apart from social listening, you can give reasons for your consumers to engage with your brand and garner information through social media. Here are a few effective strategies.
Run Contests
Running a social media contest is one of the best ways to increase brand recognition and improve engagement rates. It is an effective way to encourage your target group to contribute to your market research. For example, you can run a contest to post a photo or video of your experience with your offerings. Or you can ask them to provide testimonials and reward them. The users may come up with interesting narratives which would later become valuable insights to grow your business.
Conduct Polls
This would be an extended form of market survey where you ask questions to the target population to get the data. It has become much easier now to conduct polls on Facebook. And the good part is posts with a question are more likely to receive a better engagement rate. You can ask any relevant questions that would support your market research and gain valuable insights.
Make Use of Tools
Multiple social media listening tools are available now which will help you monitor the conversations regarding your brand in one place. It allows you to check brand mentions, keywords, tags, etc. Some tools enable users to do tracking and analytics together which makes it much easier for gaining insights. You can choose the right social media listening tools which effectively meet your requirements and reap the benefits of it.
Let Us Connect!
If you think your business has not yet leveraged social media for its growth, we are here to help you. Look no further when you need an efficient social media marketing company. We offer full-fledged social media marketing solutions that align with your business goals. We make use of effective strategies and advanced tools to leverage social media for your business benefits. Connect to our team today to discuss how to build a strong online presence for your brand.
