Around 3 billion people use social media sites like Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, their online activities add up to an immense data pool which is often times left unused. In a world where people feel at ease to share their thoughts and comments via social media accounts, companies should use the publicly voiced opinions of their potential customers to design a product that meets the demands.
There is so much knowledge to be gained from data gathered on social media sites. It can help companies to find their target market, to find out their brand’s visibility, to assess their competitors’ strength and weaknesses or to get a better understanding of the potential customers. That knowledge isn’t only important for the development of a product, but also for the conception of a business strategy and the creation of a marketing campaign. The use of social media for market research purposes is also called social media listening or social media monitoring. It helps companies to identify the market influencers, topics that clients are most interested in or even locate problems through analyzing the opinions of unhappy customers.

Reddit and Twitter, perfect tools for digital market research

Reddit, is a platform used to share and discuss almost every possible topic, is a great source of data that can be used to analyse the market one wishes to penetrate. By listening to the Reddit community, whose members often give their unfiltered opinion, it is possible to learn a lot about the consumers’ needs and the features they may want to see in the next product. A planned leak of a product detail during the development phase might bring new insight to the R&D teams. Even though it can be quite beneficial, it isn’t always easy to identify the right subreddits to follow and to sift out all the chatter and non-essential data  until one is left with clear and detailed intel.
Likewise Twitter with its 335 million global active monthly users is perfect to collect data which can be easily sifted by various tools and services. LikeFolio and similar companies have even begun to predict product popularity and stock value based on pre-release tweets witch a shocking accuracy. This is done by looking through tweets for behavioral insight and analyzing the data. A tweet can for example hold positive or negative statements and even share intent or actions of purchase. All the information put together will give companies a pretty good idea what they are facing.

Advantages of social media listening

What makes social media listening absolutely worthwhile is its superior ability to capture the current mood of customers. They feel more at ease to express themselves online and the data collected is up to date. The accuracy and swiftness of producing analytic data, all while staying more affordable than classic market research methods are other advantages of digital market research.

A propos de Bill MARTELING