Have you been meaning to try using social media research tools but just haven’t had the time? We get it. Here’s a mini lesson in the form of three quick tips to help you decide if it might be applicable to your work.
- Tip 1: Social media analysis is for more than measuring overall brand volume (mentions), trends and sentiment. While brand research is certainly a common use, there are other ways to harness the power of social media as a market research data source. Here is one example for inspiration:
- Product category research: supporting a brand’s entry into a new product category. Let’s say you work on the insights team at a beverage company that is thinking about expanding into the soup business. Great! An excellent starting point before you launch any large scale primary research would be to do some social media analysis. What are the big themes that people talk about when they talk about soup? Are these themes positive, negative or neutral in sentiment? Can you identify common complaints or wish-list items that might point to potential open spaces in the competitive landscape? Many tools identify the theme “clusters” for you so that you can find patterns at scale without reading through hundreds (or thousands) of written comments yourself.
- Tip 2: Not all social media research tools use the same data sources. Strange, but true. Some tools are really about analyzing content and sentiment from Twitter, others pull data from many sites (Facebook, news sites, Pinterest, Reddit, Twitter, and more). So as you look at tools, think about how broadly you want the data to be pulled from. While for many brands broader is better, there are cases where narrower tool may be fine (and they can also be less expensive).
- Tip 3: You CAN use social media research for B2B research needs. We may think of social media research as primarily a way to listen to consumers, but some B2B categories have a surprising amount of online mentions. Just check out how many people have posted and commented about B2B tech company Cisco on Reddit the past 30 days! Sure, you have to screen out the mentions of TV characters named Cisco, but this does demonstrate that Cisco’s IT users do talk about its products online. And for all brands, when your customers research your products online, they may very well find employee reviews as well, which can influence their perceptions.
We hope you found these three tips helpful!
Want more tips and usage examples, including demonstrations? Our Social Media Research & Sentiment Analysis eLearning course covers more details, and examples, on:
- Recommending when to use, and not use, social media research
- Using social media-based approaches to discover and measure customer attitudes and behaviors
- Mitigating risk when deploying social media research platforms
If those points resonate with you, please join us in real-time or on-demand. Next real-time session taught in the Research Rockstar virtual classroom: July 13th at 1:00 PM ET. Already a student? Find the course in your dashboard. Not yet a Research Rockstar student? We have options.
