Reading Time: 4 minutes
Marketers need to know who their audience is. No matter what kind of marketing you specialize in, you need to have a good understanding of your target audience, including their basic demographics, main challenges, and preferences.
There are many ways to conduct market research, and they each have their pros and cons. Traditional market research methods such as polls, surveys, interviews, and in-person observations are still helpful, but they are becoming outdated in many cases.
The internet and all of its corners can offer a wealth of valuable information that can easily be analyzed when you know what to look for. Social media platforms are a great place to start your research. Keep reading to learn why using social media for market research can be so effective and where to start with your social media analytics.
How to use social media for market research
There are many different kinds of marketing, but almost all modern-day marketing involves using the internet in some way. The internet’s various social media channels play a central role in digital marketing, influencer marketing, experiential marketing, video marketing, content marketing, and, of course, social media marketing.
The good news is that the same platforms you’re using in your marketing campaigns also have an enormous database of past and present information that you can use to learn more about your target market. In addition, using social media for research allows you to stay up to date on emerging trends and shifts in the market in real-time.
You can also utilize social media to get feedback on everything from customer service satisfaction to your brand or products much more quickly than you ever could before the digital age.
Another perk is that using social media in your research plan is generally affordable. There are a lot of tools (like our Instagram Analyzer tool for influencers) and analytics software options out there that can help you make sense of your social media data and make the best decisions for your marketing strategy.
With that said, it’s not impossible to conduct research all on your own—or at least get a great start. Below are four tips on starting your own social media market research.
#1: Get a grasp on people’s likes and dislikes
A successful business listens to their audience and customers and takes what they say into account. Of course, you don’t have to implement every piece of feedback, and you wouldn’t want to. But the issues or praises that come up over and over can give you a lot of insight into what you should keep doing and what you should change. This “social listening” is made much easier with social media.
The most straightforward way to see what people are saying about you on social media is to look through comments, check your mentions and tags, and read your direct messages. You can also use the Ctrl+F feature on Windows (or Command+F on Mac) to search for specific keywords on a page full of comments on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
For example, you can sign in to your business’s TikTok account on your desktop and go to a well-performing video. Then expand the comments and search for words such as “like,” hate,” “wish,” etc.
#2: Ask directly for suggestions on how to improve
Social media connects you to your audience in a way that never used to be possible. You can comment back and forth to one another, easily share relevant content, and even speak privately through direct messages if necessary. This means that getting insight and recommendations is as effortless as ever.
If you want to get some suggestions about what direction to take your brand from the people who determine your success, just ask! You can utilize features like Instagram and Twitter Polls and Surveys to get a preliminary idea of your audience’s preferences or make a simple post on your active social media channels asking people to share their opinions in the comments.
#3: Always keep tabs on social media trends
Internet trends and memes change weekly, sometimes even faster. Though it’s not really possible to create well-fleshed out marketing campaigns based on trends since they come and go so quickly, they are still important to track. Posting content inspired by current trends on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and even LinkedIn can drastically increase your customer engagement and brand awareness.
A trend can be anything—a specific meme format circulating on Instagram, a TikTok sound, or a particular type of post that everyone is making, such as “Fresh Start” posts at the beginning of a new year. If you spend enough time on any of these platforms, it will be easy to see what’s trending. You can also use features like the explore/discover tabs and trending pages to see the most popular hashtags and topics.
Though it’s not strictly social media-related, Google Trends is another great tool for comparing the popularity of specific keywords within a particular time frame. You can also search based on geographical region, search category, and search type.
#4: Use the data that’s available to you
Tracking your social media KPIs can help you measure your performance, but it can also give you valuable insight into your market. For example, if the engagement rate of one post is drastically higher than most, you can take that as a hint that you should do more of the same. Additionally, posts that get more engagement will likely have more comments, which means more qualitative feedback in addition to quantitative.
For every platform you have a presence on, calculate metrics such as impressions, post reach, follower ratio, engagement rate, growth rate, and the level of traffic that you get from each social media channel. All of this information will help you see the bigger picture in terms of where your audience hangs out on the internet.
For example, if your Facebook posts seldom get engagement and provide very little traffic to your site, but the videos you post on Instagram always get likes, comments, and link clicks, then you’ll know what platform and content format to focus your budget on in the future.
Wrap up
You can use social media to improve your market research strategy no matter your specialty within the marketing world. There are so many valuable pieces of data waiting to be analyzed on these platforms that can help you better understand your target market and the effectiveness of your current approach. Whether you use one of the many tools or software options currently available or go at it alone, you should be using social media for market research.
