Social media is ubiquitous to humans these days. Your audience wakes up and spends several minutes on phones, even before hitting the bathroom. Your users and prospects might sleep only after checking their friends’ tweets and Facebook timeline. Consumers honestly express their views online and vent out their sore points without filtering.

So, tap on the prospects of social media stats and online feedback. Harness opinions for qualitative and quantitative market research. Apart from tapping users through paid survey sites in India, the US, or elsewhere, do communicate with them directly or observe them through the immense data on social media.

Here are some ways to use social media for your benefit in market research.

4 Ways to Use Social Media in Market Research

1. Gather Real-Time Opinions

What is market research without user feedback? And if you can tap into this data in real-time through live discussions, what can be better than that?

While you work in a structured environment with online surveys and focus groups, social media is a rabbit hole with no abyss. It is nearly impossible to monitor all the tweets, posts, reels, TikTok videos, pictures, comments, and reviews people post. To make it fruitful, you should design a strategy and filter only the content that helps you.

Monitor your users’ and prospects’ views and opinions on your brand’s posts and ads. Keep a tab on your vendors, peers, and the industry’s social media engagement.

Engage your users and learn more when they appreciate or resent your product. Know what they think is missing in the industry. Find what your consumers need as enhancements. Analyze the market gaps.

Have a real-time chat with your users and dig deeper into their minds. Such one-on-one discussions are often very fruitful for qualitative market research.

2. Discover New Audience Segments

Whether new to market research or a seasoned player, you must continually work on your customer segments. Discover the segments of users for your products you never thought about.

For instance, your product is a plumbing fitting that reduces water flow in taps and converts it into a sprinkle. The most popular use of your product is in the kitchen and bathrooms. But you learn that users connect it with hoses and pipes in their gardens. Now you can refine it and sell it as a garden accessory. You may find a lot of new customer segments in the form of corporates, government premises, children’s parks, etc.

Another great use of social media is to refine your segmentation. Perhaps you have been promoting your product to Europe and US markets. And people from APAC regions express their interest, too, because no such offering is available in their countries. You can lap on this opportunity and add a new segment to your CRM data.

3. Know Your Competitors

Monitor social media channels to know what your peers are planning, doing, and reaping from the past now. Understanding your industry is crucial in all businesses, and social media channels help you to analyze what your rivals are up to.

Know what their quarterly updates, monthly themes, and yearly goals are. Figure out how you can surpass them.

Analyze their user engagement through comments and popular posts, videos, and sessions. Are your peers using AI to make their products better? Did the audience love their CSR activities and appreciate them for dipping their figures into green initiatives?

Since you share most of your audience with your industry peers, notice the reviews on Facebook (and other channels), peer-to-peer review sites, and the results of their recent surveys. Use those opinions in qualitative market research and grow your product.

 

4. Analyze the Trends

Find which hashtag is trending from the platforms where your users hang out the most. Learn how people are using a new product your brand is connected with. For instance, you produce rugs, throws, covers, runners, etc., and find out that a sophisticated version of yesteryear’s dhurries and mats is in vogue. Develop a new idea for manufacturing dhurrie-style fine table runners for the premier class.

Likewise, check out which style of images and infographics pulls the crowd. Find what’s an audience magnet in memes—from political, trivia, entertainment, education, or social community. And use them in your own social media posts with, of course, the touch of your branding, mission, and vision.

Knowing numbers and data helps set benchmarks and targets for your quantitative market research.

Pro-tip: Learn 7 tips to improve your online surveys in 2023.

Why Use Social Media for Market research

Quick

Because social media isn’t restricted to any organization or community, and anyone can benefit from the various social platforms.

You can simply use one of the widely popular tools and analyze the data according to your customer segments and product.

Comprehensive

Everyone from Gen-Z to millennials and even baby boomers uses at least one social media platform. So do marginalized people—the voices that have been systematically suppressed for ages. These diverse voices, if captured, can reveal new and untapped ideas.

If you harness the data from the digital social worlds, forums, and communities, you surely will be able to satisfy all your segments.

Affordable

Even if you don’t want to invest in expensive tools, you can still explore users’ opinions by using trial versions and employing analysts. On the contrary, if you try to capture this data from scratch, you might end up spending a lot of money.

Genuine

Chances of catching genuine voices on social media are high as users express themselves freely on an open channel rather than in interviews, focus groups, and forms where they’re aware of being monitored.

So, tap on the gold mines of social media and collect your users’ genuine data.

 

Before You Wrap Up

If you don’t foray into market research or keep your participation limited because of the lack of experience, worry not. Opinionest, with its parent company—Track Opinion—can do the tedious job for you. With nearly 14 years of industry experience, we have expertise in dealing with brands of all scales and from various industries. Please reach our experts here to start your journey in market research.