Social media market research is the process of collecting quantitative or qualitative information from any social media platform. The aim is to understand social media, consumers, competitors’ strategies, or market trends.
There are several ways, tools, and tips you can use to discover marketing insights on social media that can help your business. In addition, market research enables you to know how to use such aids in boosting your business and generating more profits.
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Key Takeaways
Social media marketing research involves the acquisition of qualitative and quantitative data. This data helps you achieve goals set for the business.
Searching for tips via social media to aid your business has to be done with a lot of accuracies. Only then can the right results be attained. That said, you can get this accuracy by using proper keywords, using the right tool, data cleaning, and a few more.
How to Make Social Media Market Research
Before doing market research, there are a few things to put in place, actions that need to be carried out. These things shape your research. With that established, below are some of them:
1. Define Your Target Goal:
Researching consumer insights on brands and products have long been a staple of social market research.
To define a target goal, you must first definitively state what your business wants information for:
- Product research
- Product launches
- Behavioral insights on target consumers
- Customer service
- Defining buyer personas
In social media monitoring, this takes place on a more granular level. Furthermore, you can parse through each mention and gather feedback as you would an open-ended survey.
For example, let’s say you’re marketing for a fitness club, and you want to gather insights on what kind of machines and classes some clients may want to see in your facility.
Your goal should then be to find a quantitative amount of data related to keywords you’re interested in. Some examples can be squat rack, treadmill, Zumba class, etc. Afterwards, parse through it to glean qualitative results.
2. Choose Quantitative or Qualitative Data (or Both):
Quantitative data will come in the form of complex numbers you can use to evaluate or measure your research.
This comes mainly in the form of:
- Likes
- Shares
- Comments
- Mention volume
- Share of voice
- Reach
- Followers
- Subscribers
Qualitative data will represent more of the “sentiment” and interpretation of specific topics regarding your research.
This can come in the following form:
- Sentiment analysis
- Word contextualization
- Theme categorization
- Industry trends
How to Acquire Data for Social Media Market Research
There are so many social media analytics platforms in existence that can help you get whatever data is necessary for actionable insights. As a result, social media market research is done using these platforms.
When making market research using social media, there are specific steps to follow or tips to use. Below are some of them.
1. Choose the right tool:
Choosing the right tool is as important as defining the business goal. Businesses, especially those trying to get a good reputation online, need a tool that allows them to get many mentions from the necessary channels.
Businesses also need a tool that cleans the necessary data with features that can fine-tune results. In addition, the right tool should be able to provide actionable and conclusive data with advanced metrics.
Some tools have specific functions like monitoring one channel. On the other hand, others do many social media channels, blogs, and news publications.
Therefore, it’s up to you to decide what will give you the most critical data for your set goals.
2. Choosing the Right Keywords:
Your keywords are the questions that will shape the results you get. These are specific words that direct your search. Additionally, they help you narrow down your search and get almost accurate results.
When arranging your social media market research, it’s crucial to understand which combination of keywords will help you get the data you need and dismiss the data you don’t need.
So, be generic with your search words. However, you have to make sure the data you’re getting is as detailed as it should be.
Furthermore, market research strategies differ. Of course, this difference depends on the goal of the research. Nevertheless, generally, it is still an excellent approach to cast a wide net. You can then build a quantitative data strategy with social listening tools.
3. Data Cleaning:
After identifying a trend within your social media topic, you can further sieve the data to uncover more tailored market research data.
Data cleaning is the process of identifying irrelevant, misleading, or incomplete sections of your data set. It also includes modifying your parameters to reflect much more accurate data.
This is one of the most time-consuming aspects of social media market research. It requires a lot of time and patience to find significant trends that are bringing in unrequired data.
We can also clean the data by reducing the words used, classifying them by male, female, or unknown gender (often for businesses). Alternatively, you can choose filtering by sentiment alone.
On traditional social media platforms, there aren’t many options to filter the data for conclusive market research results. That is why more advanced tools are necessary.
Conclusion
Social media market research is essential for businesses. Over the years, it has proved its importance to businesses. Therefore, if you are hoping to grow your business, carrying out market research is vital.
That said, you must make use of this definitive guide. What are your thoughts on this piece? Was it beneficial to you? Kindly leave your feedback below. We look forward to hearing from you.
