Social Market Research
Just as social media has proven its power as a customer-service tool, it is also a boon to market research. Social media aids in market research in multiple dimensions.
Audience recruitment. Social media give marketers unparalleled, low-cost access to large audiences, plus the ability to select them with great specificity. Facebook, for example, allows researchers to recruit respondents using its regular advertising program. You can post a link to your survey, and deliver an ad promoting the survey on a pay-for-performance basis to particular targets based on Facebook’s normal ad targeting selection process.
Surveying. Social media allow informal gathering of opinions, feedback and ideas from a variety of audiences, using a variety of tools. You can post a question just about anywhere—on your own blog, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo! Groups and many other groups, like on LinkedIn or other forums. While not statistically projectible samples, the results may be used the way you use any qualitative research—and the cost is next to nothing.
Monitoring. Scores of new tools are available to allow researchers to take the pulse of social media users. Among them,
- Blogpulse enables analysis of trends in blog discussions.
- Tweetgrid, Tweetdeck and Hootsuite all offer search tools for keeping track of Twitter conversations.
- YouTube lets marketers get feedback (comments) on their new broadcast ads.
- StumbleUpon shows demographics of the people who have professed an interest in various topics, allowing marketers to get a quick sense of the appeal of ideas, brands, or products to particular audience segments.
One wonderful extra benefit is that, after gathering and analyzing comments about a brand in various social media, the researcher can go back and pose a direct follow-up question to the individual to gain more insight into the reasons behind the comment.
Support for traditional market research. When taken on their own, many social media research options raise issues of reliability in the minds of traditional market researchers. For one thing, respondent quality is hard to verify. For another, the available respondent universe may not reflect the target audience, resulting in a skewed sample. But even the most demanding research professional can use social media tools in tandem with traditional methods, to gain efficiencies. For example, informal monitoring analysis can be used to narrow down a wide range of answer options, eliminating “outliers” and also making the questions easier for respondents to answer.
Combined with a host of other online market research tools—like focus group platforms, community interaction software, and survey instruments—social media is yet another valuable resource for marketers who want to investigate the needs and interests of customers and prospects.