The social media landscape is constantly evolving. Social media platforms are an important way for brands to communicate with their target audience. Customers and prospects use social media for a variety of purposes, including interacting with their favorite brands, following their favorite artists or influencers, keeping in touch with friends and family, seeking creative inspiration, or just for fun. With over 3.6 billion users worldwide, social media is here to stay. One study even found that internet users spend an average of 144 minutes a day on social media.
With so much happening on every social media platform, businesses need to stay connected to better understand and meet the needs of their audiences. Companies that don’t monitor social media risk missing out on opportunities to better engage with their audiences in timely and relevant ways—they miss important trending conversations on Twitter, catch up on new trends on TikTok, or notice negative comments about Facebook Customer Experience. Therefore, brands need to stay informed about the various trends and conversations happening on the platform.
But how can marketers effectively track these social networks and turn the numbers into actionable insights? Enter social media to listen.
The benefits of social monitoring and listening
Social listening tools allow marketers to track metrics like brand mentions, engagement, and brand sentiment. Social analytics tracking not only helps marketers keep up with trends, but also provides the analytics needed to build custom social media strategies. Using historical data from brand and social media mentions to track project progress and create relevant, achievable goals and key results (OKRs) ensures companies have robust marketing programs running on a data-centric foundation.
Market research with social listening
One way that social media listening is underutilized is in market research. Broadly defined as gathering information about a target market or audience, market research relies on several different methods of gathering information. Social media listening is one such approach. Brands can use a variety of research strategies and analytical tools to stay ahead. Primary research (surveys and focus groups) and secondary research (industry analysis, competitor analysis, audience analysis, media analysis, and social media analysis) are the keys to truly understanding the market, audience, and competition.
Trend monitoring and customer engagement
Social media listening can show marketers and researchers which topics are driving high engagement in their audience, changes in average brand sentiment or sentiment over time, trends in social media conversations, and more. For example, social media listening can help you identify the right opportunities for your brand to engage with stakeholders, customers or prospects. Never miss the right time to join a Twitter or TikTok trend again! Use trending social media conversations as an indicator of what content should be prioritized, or Newsjack can ensure your brand gets the most views and traction from your target audience.
Sentiment analysis
Social listening can also help track social mention trends and brand sentiment over time. For example, when your company launches a campaign, tracking social analytics like brand mentions, sentiment, and engagement before, during, and after the campaign allows your team to analyze and quantify the success of the campaign. Tracking these types of social media analytics can also help set benchmarks for future events and create goals and key results for broader programs and programs. Social listening doesn’t stop with your brand’s followers. Savvy marketers can also use social media listening to track how competitors are interacting with audiences and identify potential opportunities to optimize messaging to better meet the needs of their competitor’s customer base.
Influencer Insights
Social media listening is also a great tool for identifying influencers. As influencer marketing becomes more prevalent in the competitive landscape, brands no longer need to know which influencers have the most followers to identify potential endorsers or brand advocates. Brands need to know which influencers are getting the most engagement. Social listening can help determine which influencers are most engaged and who they interact with the most on social platforms.
Market research tools with Social Listening
Market research on social networks basically seeks to find out what people want in order to assess whether or not your project is viable. Social networks have become spaces where people share their lives, their likes and dislikes and where, basically, they express what they think. For this reason, social networks are currently used as a source of information to carry out market research. This of course can be done at different levels, people will not always say exactly what they think, however through their tastes and the type of information they share, we could also get an idea of what they are really looking for.
Another interesting way to use social networks as a source of information could be when a company wants to start in an international market. Today the best way to obtain information about it is by searching the Internet.
Of course, it is also important to go a little further than digital, but it is definitely a resource that should be taken advantage of, from which information can be obtained quickly and at practically zero cost.
The online world can provide us with a large amount of quality information, the key is to carry out an adequate data extraction so that they are really useful to us in achieving our goals. Depending on the objective, market research on social networks can be a complement to traditional market research, or they can give us all the information we need, without the need to resort to more.
Another scenario that can arise for companies that already have a digital presence is from the interaction with their followers, quality information can be obtained that allows them to know what the followers of the product think, critics, suggestions, of the topics that they talk about the most, and from there, complementary business lines could be developed.
Market research in social networks
Before starting a study, we must have perfectly planned the objective that we want to achieve with it, so that we can define the most appropriate procedures, techniques and tools to obtain valuable results.
Below, we show you some examples of market research that you can carry out using the ATRIBUS digital monitoring tool and that can be tremendously useful when defining your business plans and strategies.
- Investigate the market with Atribus: As we explained earlier, there is a lot of information on social networks that can help us get to know our consumers a little better and therefore develop more effective strategies. However, social networks have millions of users and it is humanly impossible to extract information by checking profile by profile. Fortunately, in this information age, there are digital monitoring tools like Atribus.
- Sectoral analysis: By carrying out a good monitoring of social networks and the Internet, you can find out what the trends are in your sector or market, so that you can identify new fashions and new user needs, thus anticipating the market. For example, imagine that you are in the beer industry and you want to know words used when talking about beer. Atribus could show you this information and you could use it to develop strategies and know what is being talked about in the sector. But this does not end here, in turn you could identify the most used hashtags when talking about beer, thus knowing the trends in social networks.
- Benchmarking: you could monitor the work of your competition and measure the impact it is having and the opinion on social networks.
Measure the impact of your campaigns on social networks: Measure the impact your campaigns are having on social networks, and check if they are receiving a positive, negative or neutral reception. - Analyze, know and identify your target audience: Get to know your users, how they speak and their interests. Identify industry Influencers and find out what they say about your brand and the industry in general. Market research on social networks can provide us with a large amount of information, with which it will allow us to achieve the goals we set for ourselves. A digital monitoring tool like Atribus will help us extract information from social networks and therefore make us more effective.
How to do market research on social networks?
Thanks to the great flexibility of social listening platforms, the object of study of market research with social listening can be very varied, offering researchers endless possibilities.
Before starting the massive data collection with the social listening platform, as in traditional market research, organizations and companies must understand what the object of study is and all the elements that are directly or indirectly related to it. Once the research problem is understood, they must look for the main conversations related to the object of study on social networks and the Internet to understand how users express themselves.
In this way, it is possible to determine which phrases, hashtags or keywords (also known as keywords) the social listening tool will monitor, as well as in which languages and regions the study will be carried out. In addition, as we have previously mentioned, it allows companies and organizations to monitor the social network profiles of specific users.
Once the necessary information and the needs of the investigation have been established, the social listening platform is programmed so that it systematically collects all the comments related to our investigation.
The technology of the tool simultaneously analyzes and categorizes all the information and offers reports with the data obtained such as what are the main topics of conversation, which social networks have more information, what is the sentiment of the comments, who are the most influential users and what are the demographic data of the sample, among many other useful data.
Social listening is a market research tool that all brands should use to better understand and communicate with their target audience. As social media continues to permeate our daily lives, brands that successfully listen to their customers’ conversations on social media and use those insights to develop their marketing strategies are better equipped to thrive in a competitive environment.
