Market research plays a fundamental role in the success of a business, although it can be an expensive process. Social media, however, represents an extremely helpful and cost-effective tool that global businesses have started using in these last years to conduct practical and economically convenient research about their target markets and competitors.
The majority of social media platforms provide different methods that allow business owners to analyse market trends, without spending money and time.
Facebook and Twitter are among the most popular social media networks used by companies for market research purposes.
Social media enable you to discover who your potential customers are, where they are located, what interests they have, what type of social medium they like using the most, what groups they are part of and most importantly, what aspects all of them have in common.
In addition to this, social media gives you the chance to understand who your competitors are and see how they behave as well as what techniques they adopt on social media. To get a clearer idea about what marketing strategies should be implemented in order to attract more followers, and consecutively a bigger number of potential customers, it is recommendable to carefully observe other businesses’ behaviour on social media, especially the biggest competitors.
You will, for instance, find out how they interact with their followers, how they deal with sudden issues, how they satisfy their customers’ needs, what offers they provide, what hashtags they use, what type of content they post, how frequently and with the implementation of what tone of voice. This type of approach will enable you to learn from the most successful companies and apply similar methods.
Facebook can be used as an extraordinary tool for market research purposes. On the App settings section, for example, you will notice what apps other businesses use. By looking for nearby businesses, based on specific categories and locations, you will see what pages your friends, or any other user, like. Posting pictures and videos with a catchy headline presenting a question to your followers, can also be a strategic way of getting feedback and engagement.
Reading customers’ reviews on Facebook, or websites as Yelp and Trip Advisor, can give you an idea about what are the most trending businesses in your area and why people like them or not. In case such businesses are successful, it would be again useful to double check their activities on their social media accounts.
On both Facebook and Twitter you have the opportunity to daily discover what the biggest trends are, as well as the most used hashtags, allowing you in this way to rapidly understand what people are currently interested in. By learning such information, you can immediately start using the same hashtags and try to implement similar trends, in order to understand what the market appreciates, while at the same time, attracting more followers on your platforms.
The advantages of conducting market research on social media are many, as explained above. The important thing to constantly keep in mind is that trends change very quickly so, if you want to keep your business’ success growing, you have to do your market research on a weekly or daily basis.
Clarissa Lulli