How to Use Social Media for Market Research

Market research can be an expensive and time-intensive process. However, many businesses are beginning to return to social media as an affordable and in-depth tool to gain insights into their customer, market, brand presence, and other important market research. 

The key to using social media for market research is to understand the benefits and create an appropriate plan. These six tips provide an easy way to implement ways to use social media in your market research methods for better, measurable results.

1. Track Trends with Social Media for Real-Time Insights

Most social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook provide a myriad of ways to conduct trend analysis and market research. Just by searching for the latest posts and popular terms, you can gain insights into emerging trends and see what customers are saying in real-time. An example of this is conducting a hashtag search on Twitter. By placing a few searches with hashtags related to your brand, industry, or product, you can get instant notifications when customers, clients, or competitors use key terms.

2. Learn the Language of Your Audience for Improved Marketing Appeal

The words and factors you use to track the success of your product or business are not what customers look for most. By analyzing social media exchanges about your product or service, you can learn how customers talk about your product, service, or brand, as well as what factors they use to set prices. By using these factors and terms in your own marketing, you can talk directly to consumers and improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Value, quality, and other important terms By creating a customer-centric definition you can help create a brand or product image that is unique among competitors and speaks directly to your target market.

3. Use the Real-Time Aspects of Social Media for Quick Research

Traditional market research methods such as surveys or study groups can take months to plan, form, and perform. With social media, research can be done in minutes or hours. This makes it possible to use market research to track the increasingly specific aspects of your marketing efforts. From product launches to follow-up marketing, every part of your marketing plan can be independently analyzed throughout your marketing plan for improved results. Instead of spending months developing a marketing research plan and simply retrieving outdated information as trends change, you can now use social media for market research.

4. Use Social Media to Broaden the Scope of Your Market Research

The demographic existence of virtually every market is growing in popularity with both the social media business and the consumer. A 2019 report by Nielsen on social media states that about 80 percent of people with access to the Internet use social media. This makes it possible to conduct market research with an audience that is many times more than any other marketing or media source can provide. The casual nature and easy access to social media help promote user interaction, engagement, and participation. This improves your chances of getting useful, accurate, and honest data from your efforts.

5. Discover Unnoticed Trends and Insights by Engaging Instead of Leading

The biggest weakness of most marketing research methods is that they are driven by a variety of questions. To get the right information, you must first know what to ask. At the same time, simply reconstructing a question can lead to fatally different answers. This means that your market research is just as great as your question. Information is obtained through interaction and observation, with the wide scope and interactive nature of social media. Instead of leading the discussion, you can simply observe or join as an equivalent. This may be the result of various answers and discoveries that may be hidden using different research methods.

6. Harness Social Media Research for Improved Cost Efficiency

In most cases, using social media for market research is just a matter of time investment. Free tools exist for almost every social media platform to help you gather information and use it to gather useful information. The cost difference is surprising when compared to focus panels, discussion groups, studies, and surveys. Through user engagement and discussion, your social media research also works as advertising, brand building, network building, lead generation and offers many more improvements for your business or brand. When planned and applied properly, market research tools provide the overall benefits of cost-efficiency and social media research.

From real-time access to information on declining trends and the ability to uncover hidden trends and improve your marketing approach, social media provides a powerful way to optimize any business's market research efforts. After all, social media research provides a myriad of ways to interact with your market and build your business. It's easier to conduct research like signing up for social media services like LinkedIn or Twitter and using their built-in search features. Within minutes you can work to analyze business trends, improve marketing strategies, and achieve the desired results.