Tag: Social Media

When Dove launched its #SpeakBeautiful campaign in 2016, it relied heavily on social media market research to compile the data it needed for its social media strategy.

They analyzed over 5 million social media mentions on Twitter and found that approximately 80% of female users online had experienced negative body shaming comments.

What happened next was one of the most effective online marketing campaigns of the 21st century:

• 36% decrease in body shaming comments on Twitter
• 63% increase in sales
• 168,000 mentions with the hashtag in a year

What Dove and Twitter used to their advantage, businesses are now turning to in droves – using social media for market research.

Social media market research is the process of gathering quantitative and/or qualitative data from social media platforms to understand social, consumer, or market trends.

Other forms of market research can also be effective – such as surveys, focus groups, online polls, etc., – but are costly, time consuming, and inconclusive.

Social media market research is a better business investment as it:

• Has a higher ROI
• Gives immediate and/or historical data
• Returns results from independent environments

There are a variety of different methods, tools, and tips you can use to uncover market insights on social media, which we’ll cover in this post.

Establish Goals

Every social media market research campaign has to have a clear goal in mind:

• Do you want to conduct market research on your brand, products, online consumer behavior, consumer insights, customer service, or competitor insights?
• Do you want qualitative or quantitative data or both?
• If so, what measurements will help you define this?
• What social media channels do you want to mine data from?

Establishing a clear goal will help you plan and execute the way in which you attain your information.

1. Define Your Target Goal

Researching consumer insights on brands and/or products has long been a staple of social market research.

To define a target goal, you must first definitively state what your business wants information for:

• Product research
• Product launches
• Behavioral insights on target consumers
• Customer service
• Defining buyer personas

In social media monitoring, this takes place on a more granular level; you can parse through each mention and gather feedback as you would an open-ended survey.

On a social media listening level, you can aggregate insights to establish trends and data in quantitative form.

In Dove’s case, they targeted quantitative social media behavioral insights that were affecting their target consumers.

Thus, their market research strategy probably looked like this:

1. Identify a target demographic (adult women) and their pain points (beauty / body image).
2. Recognize the places (social media platforms) where their target demographic is most confronted with these pain points (body shaming).
3. Undergo intensive research on how target consumers are affected in these places (social media market research).
4. Create a campaign that gets to the heart of the issue by having the target demographic assess the problem organically (women choosing which door to walk through).
5. Publish the data (research findings) in tandem with the campaign (visual content) via the medium or place where the target demographics experience the pain point the most (Twitter).

The end result was a viral campaign that really began with understanding social behaviors on social media.

This is just one example of a brand relying on social behavior to market its products, but there are a variety of ways social media market research can be used to boost business.

2. Choose Quantitative or Qualitative Data or Both

Quantitative data will come in the form of concrete numbers you can use to evaluate or measure your research.

This can come in the form of:

• Likes
• Shares
• Comments
• Mention volume
• Share of voice
• Reach
• Followers
• Subscribers

Depending on the social media platform, there are numerous metrics you can use to compile quantitative data.

Qualitative data will represent more of the “sentiment” and interpretation of certain topics in regard to your research.

Commonly, this kind of data and research is performed daily by social media managers in regard to customer service and identifying feelings about the brand or products.

This can come in the form of:

• Sentiment analysis
• Word contextualization
• Theme categorization
• Industry trends

Qualitative research is usually a precursor to quantitative social media research – it looks to uncover a certain feeling in relation to a topic.

Think of qualitative research as social media monitoring to uncover specific mentions and feelings about a topic.

Then by applying social media listening to understand the more widespread sentiment, trends, and context in aggregate, you can get more quantitative data to draw conclusions from.

For example, a business discovers that they have 1,000 mentions about their product (quantitative) of which 84% of the mentions have a positive sentiment (quantitative).

3. Choose Social Media Channels

Deciding which social media channels to mine data from is the next most important step in establishing how you want to acquire your data.

Different social channels have different demographics depending on region and behavioral norms for the channel.

Conducting social media market research on modeling careers on Twitter, for example, will yield much different results than on LinkedIn.

If we look at the demographic data for each social channel in 2016, we’ll notice a few trends and data groups that can help us choose which channels to pick.

What’s more is that you can pivot your market research goals to these specific channels to try and mine more data from target demographics.

Again, how you choose channels for your social media market research will depend entirely on your goals and strategy, but choosing the right channels is a vital step.

How to Get Social Media Market Research Data

There are numerous social media analytics platforms out there that can help you acquire the data required for actionable insights.

4. Choose The Right Tool

Choosing the right tool is as paramount as defining a goal – businesses need a tool that allows them to:

• Mine a high volume of mentions from the necessary channels
• Clean the data when necessary with features that can fine-tune results
• Provide actionable and conclusive data with advanced metrics.

For our examples we’ve been using Unamo Social Media Monitoring, but there are also a variety of other tools that can help mine the necessary data.

Some tools specifically monitor one channel, while some do a multitude of social media channels, blogs, and news publications.

Choose what’s going to give you the most relevant data for your target goals and demographics.

5. Choosing the Right Keywords

Your keywords are essentially the questions that will shape the results you get.

When coordinating your social media market research, it’s vital to understand which combination of keywords will help you attain the data you want and exclude the data you don’t.

Try to be generic with your search terms to cast a wide net; however, you need to ensure the data you’re getting is as detailed as possible.

For example, if we set up a topic to find out how people feel about the iPhone 8 and 10, then we will want to exclude certain terms that vendors might use that flood social media.

We use the asterisk rule in order to make sure that any variations of the root before the asterisk appear in the results.

This enables businesses to find mentions about the product itself and exclude words revolving around selling the product.

From this qualitative data, businesses can infer that a lot of discussion is taking place about the iPhone 8 camera and batteries, which they can then use to:

1. Track additional keywords revolving around these subjects in relation to the product.
2. Understand the quantitative data for the new keywords based off the qualitative results
3. Formulate a marketing strategy that can capitalize on the positive feedback and pivot against the negative feedback.

We can also easily attain qualitative data from word clouds which depict the most common words appearing in context with the main keywords.

Market research strategies vary depending on research goals, but it’s a good overall approach to cast a wide net and then build a quantitative data strategy with social listening tools.

6. Data Cleaning

Now that we’ve identified a trend within our social media topic, we can further parse the data to uncover more tailored market research data.

Data cleaning is the process of recognizing irrelevant, misleading, or incomplete parts of your data set and modifying your parameters to reflect more accurate data.

This can be one of the most time consuming aspects of social media market research as it requires a lot of time and patience to uncover significant trends that are bringing in unwanted data.

For example, companies like Kleenex, Sharpie, or Google may have an extremely hard time data cleaning for mentions about their brand because their brand names have become nouns or verbs.

Similarly, a brand like Target faces difficulties because the word is both the brand name and a commonly used noun and verb.

Thus, these brands have to be extremely meticulous about how they use additional keywords in conjunction with their brand for social media market research.

In our example, we’ve homed in on mentions of our main keyword that include “battery” in the mention and exclude vendor related keywords.

This enables us to gain quantitative social media data on our topic to measure the volume of mentions, potential reach, shares, and more.

We can also clean the data by excluding more words, segmenting by male, female, or unknown gender (usually publications or businesses), or filtering by sentiment alone.

On traditional social media platforms, there aren’t a lot of options to filter the data for conclusive market research results, which is why more advanced toolsets are necessary.

Drawing Conclusions

Once we have cleaned our data it’s time to draw conclusions and formulate a strategy.

7. Turn Conclusions Into Strategy

The end goal is of course how businesses turn social media market research into strategy.

Staying within the example above, we can conclude from our social market research that the social reach of the issue decreased significantly over the past few weeks while the amount of mentions stayed fairly consistent.

This tells us that many of the tech influencers discussing the topic have moved on – the reach has plummeted – while more modest profiles have continued to mention it.

We also know that the most engagement with the product was via video content as YouTube mentions were the most prolific.

Our social media market research in this example has identified that:

• Tech influencers created a flurry of PR around the topic in a relatively short period.
• YouTube was the primary channel that the product was discussed on.

We can conclude that one potential remedy for this problem would be to reach out to YouTube influencers to get them to promote the product in a positive light to avoid more backlash on social media.

Conclusion

Social media market research is just one avenue businesses can take to gain insights on their target consumers.

Channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., provide businesses a unique look into consumer behavior in environments where insights are given freely and (mostly) untainted.

However, social market research may not be for everyone; it depends on the insights you want, where you’re likely to find those insights from your target consumers, and the metrics needed to quantify and qualify the data.

Social media marketing. You know the basics.

Make a Facebook page, tweet, snap a pic for Instagram. Boom. Done. And you understand the benefits of a dedicated place for customers to interact with your brand.

So, why would you need to worry about social media management? What is it anyway?

Imagine this: what if you could eavesdrop on every conversation about your brand that’s happening right now online. Sound like a super power?

Well, good news – it’s not. Social media management let’s you pick up online conversations about your brand so that you can draw conclusions and take action.

A great social media management strategy can help you do the things that make a major difference – from putting out fires before they start to finding influencers to market your product. That’s why you need to know what social media management is and why it’s important.

That’s why this article will tell you:

• What social media management is and why it’s important for your brand.
• How to find out which social media management tools are right for you.
• What a social media manager is and what skills they need for success.

What is Social Media Management and Why is It Important?

Let’s start with the basics:

What is social media management?

Social media management is the act of monitoring and responding to posts and discussions happening in real time across social media platforms and other social gathering places online.

Social media management includes compiling, listening, analyzing, and engaging with mentions. If your business has an online presence, your marketing and customer outreach strategy can benefit from great social media management.

Another way to think of social media management is as the backend of your social media strategy. Yes, you have social profiles. You post content, run advertising, engage with your community, and conduct customer service across multiple platforms.

Social media management goes one step further and let’s you listen to customer conversations happening beyond your branded profiles.

What is social listening?

Social listening is one of the more confusing aspects of social media management. Social media listening is identifying trends and overall sentiment related to your brand. The difference between social listening and social media monitoring is the scale.

Social media monitoring is when you look at individual mentions. For example, one customer tweets that they don’t like your product. You read that tweet and respond with a public apology and offer to resolve the issue in private.

Social listening is recognizing that the complaint was not isolated. You realize that the problem is trending. Your product seems to have a genuine defect.

Instead of responding to individual mentions you decide to address the problem by announcing that you’re company is taking steps to resolve the issue internally.

For example, Apple gets a complaint about a swollen battery in a new iPhone 8 on Twitter. They handle the response. Perhaps there are two or three more that day. All seem like isolated events. That’s social media monitoring – fielding one complaint at a time.

But let’s say Apple has a strong social listening strategy as well. They notice that when they track conversations about their new product online there are certain words that are dominating the conversation:

The word “battery” is trending. When they start to look at individual mentions including the word battery, Apple notices that the conversations are about swelling batteries in the new iPhone 8. They can see that the swollen batteries are not isolated issues but rather a more general model defect.

Why is social media management important?

Social media management is important because it lets you know what people are saying about you – good or bad – in real time online, giving you insight in how to react and respond.

Remember when “word of mouth” was a thing? Well, it still is. A long, long time ago, before social media, a customer would tell her friends, mother, and work colleagues about how much she loved or hated your product.

You could count the number of people within her sphere of influence on your fingers.

Now, she can tell hundreds of people that she may not even know how much she hates or loves your product. She can write reviews, she can comment in public forums, and she can interact with your brand before, during, and after her purchasing experience.

The upside for you? You can now know what she’s saying to whom, and you can join the conversation as it’s happening.

If you’re not listening to what she’s saying online, you’re missing out on hundreds of marketing and customer service opportunities.

Opportunities that could not only make her experience better, but her entire audience’s experiences as well.

Here’s what social media management allows you to do:

• Monitor Brand Awareness
• Gauge Customer Sentiment
• Incentivize Positive Engagement
• Address Crisis Situations
• Analyze Customer Demographics
• Conduct Competitor Research
• Track Industry Trends
• Identify Niche Influencers

Great social media management strategies allow you to tackle customer engagement in all its forms – good, bad, and ugly.

What is a social media management tool?

One of the more harrowing choices you’ll have to make when deciding your social media management strategy is which listening tool is right for your brand. But let’s start from the beginning.

What is a social media management tool?

A social media management tool is software that captures conversations about a topic or profile of your choice and stores them in one place for you. Often, the tool will organize the data for social listening and analysis purposes. You can then draw insights and take action within the tool.

Unamo Social is a social media management and monitoring tool. To illustrate how some tools work, we will use our tool as an example. Unamo Social searches Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Instagram for public mentions related to a keyword of your choice.

In overview mode, you can see a chart that will show you how many times your keyword showed up in public mentions on any given day over a specified time period.

The tool allows you to track:

• Trending Topics
• Sentiment
• Demographics
• Influencers
• Individual Mentions

Before you choose a social media management tool, it’s best to decide which social platforms you want to track and what kind of insight you’d like to have into your topic of choice.

What is a social media manager?

A social media manager is the person who does all the compiling, reading, analyzing, and engaging with any mentions about you online, essentially implementing all aspects of your social media management strategy.

The person is dedicated to undertaking these tasks, and knows how to use social media monitoring tools to get the job done.

Now, you may begin to notice that more and more people from within your business need to engage with your customers via social media and other online platforms. That means that your social media manager is not the only person who may need to analyze or respond to mentions.

So, while it is beneficial to have someone dedicated to building your social media management strategy, you’ll want other employees to have these management skills as well.

Here are some extra skills you may want a social media manager to have to advance your social media management strategy company-wide:

• Knowledge of Social Aesthetics
• Written Communication
• Customer Service Skills
• Basic Marketing or SEO Skills

Pro Tip: Do notice that there is a difference between a social media manager and a community manager and there are many, many job titles for both positions. It’s best to ask candidates to demonstrate that they have the analytical AND creative skill set necessary for social media management.

Conclusion

Understanding social media management is a necessary step to a holistic approach to social media marketing. It’s no longer enough to hire a fresh graduate to manage your Facebook account. Now, you need to listen to the whole conversation.

The only way to get the full picture of what people think of your brand is to make sure you’re listening everywhere and drawing conclusions from overarching insights. And at the end of the day, you probably will feel like you have a super power.