How to use social media to find powerful consumer insights.

social media

Brands using social media as a mere CRM tool or for tracking brand sentiments, are losing big.

Social media provides enormous consumer research opportunities. The speed, cost, number of respondents, honesty. . .the benefits are endless. Mostly known, few unknown. For instance, link people’s interests to purchase behavior and gain wider consumer insights. More over, pick the valuable consumer thinking from the conversations, posts, complaints and compliments people post.

Social Media is like a live focus group. The knowledge gathered should be utilized into more quantitative research.

On social media 24x7 live

One of the many advantages of social media is, it lets you eavesdrop on the consumer intentions.

Arguably these are the real hardcore consumer buying insights. Which are unbiased, real untapped intentions. For this reason, the naked truth.

There are quite a few other possibilities with social media. One of them being, testing the creatives, the communication. It lets you carefully select the sample. You can spot influencers. Reach to the audience who is unaware that they have an influence.

Having genuine advocates

It is a myth that one has to really spend money to reach to the real advocates. There is a clear opportunity plus method to organically reach out to the brand fans.

An emerging myth within the audiences is, everything which is being pushed at me is promotional and paid.

Here lies the opportunity, simply reach out to the loyal base…without asking them to buy anything, but making them feel special and rewarded. These brand fans are far priceless assets compared to the paid influencers, which are like online banners. And we all know, people have banner blindness, our mind is trained to look away from ads.

Even if your brand fans have a smaller following, reach out to them sincerely. Since you already have something right going with them, use the opportunity to make them stick and trust you more. Whenever you reach out to them acknowledge their loyalty.

Another social insight is, identifying a strategy for ‘lookalikes’.

social media lookalikeReaching out to the lookalikes

A Lookalike Audience is a way to reach new similar people. People who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to people who already are engaged with your product or brand.

Since you have a fair amount of predicted information about their buying needs and habits. It is easy to influence the similar audience and bring them into the consideration phase of buying your product or service. All one has to do is know your existing consumer well. And look out for me too’s.

You can dive deep into the social data, understand the existing consumer habits and behavior by heart. Which will become the basis to predict new similar buyers.

Social media data is all about the behavioral aspect rather than attitudinal. Hence it is very useful in highlighting customer groups that brands may not have previously considered. Know how to create a lookalike audience

Test creative campaigns

Brands constantly need fresh content and new ideas to propagate it. But how and where do you get the content that resonates with the target audiences?

Social listening is being used more and more to know what clicks with audiences. Testing creative and adapt campaigns before the final release is something that is done very effectively. If once you are able to get a hang of what is hooking up with the audience a lot can be done well. For example, if your ad is getting past that five-second ‘skip ad’ moment on Youtube – then you know it is working.

Furthermore, you may get one piece of the consumer insight from one platform but you can go back and see if it could fit well with others too. Not just all of what we said and discussed, one interesting aspect is you get and have audience that you wish to target sharply in abundance

Something everyone takes for granted is finding a small and right sample size to test, social media provides you the same.

Social Media is a potent tool to find powerful consumer insights. Social media will continue to develop and evolve as a research tool. 

 

Visiting Professor
The singularity towards identifying and mining consumer insights is what drives him -- Seasoned Content Creator, Writer -- Built & nurtured powerful Global and Indian brands that have won consumer confidence & delivered outstanding business results
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