Socail media for market research
Market research is a time consuming and expensive process.
Therefore, many businesses have started to turn towards social media since it
has cost effective benefits and also helps in gaining insights into their
customers, markets, brand, and other needed market research aspects. There is
also an important need for understanding the advantages and creating a research
plan because it is the key to utilizing social media for market research.
The most famous social media platforms like Facebook or
Instagram provides several ways to analyze the on-going trends like by simply
searching the latest posts or popular terms or hashtag searches on twitter etc.
In the current times, social media has gained a lot of
importance with both business and customers across every market. This helps in
conducting market research in a larger audience that is much larger than any
other source can provide. This helps in gaining more accurate and useful data
from social media.
One of the greatest drawbacks for most of the market
research are that they are driven by questions. To get accurate information, we
must first know what to ask and also the answers can be very different. This
leads to the conclusion that the market research is only as good as the
questions.
Using social media for market research is all about the time
invested in it. There are various tools in social media that helps to obtain
information and convert them into useful information. When it is compared with
discussion groups, focus groups, one on one, etc this can be more cost
effective. The traditional market research methods such as questionnaire,
surveys, or group studies consumes a lot of time to plan, form and to bring in
action. With the help of social media, the researches can be completed within
minutes or in hours.
Also, when the product or service is analyzed on social
media, the real factors what the customer use to find the value and the way
they communicate about the product, service or brand can be learned. By using
these the product can be effectively marketed and also product image can be
improved.
It is important for a brand or organization to understand
what and who their competitors are. Social media research helps to gain insight
on their competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Reaction of the customers
towards the competitors’ products can also be determined through this source
which will help to make convenient changes in the product. There are several
ways to do market research on social media. Some of them are as follows:
·
Content analysis-the engagement rate or
the attractiveness of the customers towards a product, post, or message can be
determined by the number of likes, shares and comments on them.
·
Social listening-the feedback about the
product, post, or message of both our product and competitors’ product is
collected from the customers to analyse.
·
Votes/ questions- to encourage the
customers to share what they feel or think, questions are asked directly on
social media feeds.
The data of the customers on famous social media platforms
like Facebook, twitter, or Instagram may not be the representative sample of
the total customer base but it can be the truthful opinion from the customers.
Social media is a solid rich source of market research that understand the
reasons and opinions to buy or not buy a product.
