This post originally appeared on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud blog.
If you thought your brand couldn't afford traditional market research, social media is here to help. From focus groups to interviews to surveys, social media is your readily-available, real-time market research shop. Here are 30 ways to do it.
- Find out which of your promotions/offers are shareable
- Analyze sentiment of blog posts
- Find the competition
- Learn what that competition is doing
- Determine brand awareness
- Track keyword mentions around your products/services
- Determine customer satisfaction or loyalty
- Understand market demographics to determine your best target audience
- Determine your brand ambassadors
- Uncover your industry influencers
- Get feedback on new packaging or pricing
- Determine how saturated your market may be
- Find relevant hashtags
- Find relevant Twitter chats
- Determine the best social media channel(s) for future launches
- Test ads on Facebook before they launch
- Create surveys and polls
- Let users vote on different design options or TV ads
- DM (Direct Message) a customer on Twitter to ask a question
- Start a discussion on LinkedIn to source feedback
- Determine key phrases to add to your SEO strategy
- Join a relevant forum and conduct a quick focus group
- Determine consumer ratings with review sites like Epinions or Yelp
- Use Pinterest to find out what consumers are pinning from your website
- Use Google Analytics to uncover the top keywords used to find your website
- Find out which social media channel sends you the most web traffic
- Optimize your campaign based on what's working or not working
- Segment and test different ads on Facebook
- Create a Pinterest board of different images and see what gets repinned the most
- Find customer stories about your product/service
With the right social media tools and approach, you'll derive deep, meaningful, real-time insights across numerous consumer segments and topics far more cost-effectively than ever before.
What other tips would you add for conducing research using social media? Add your ideas here.
