So many corporations have tapped into the highly successful world of social media marketing. You can see it every time you watch a television show, see an advertisement, and even while chatting with your family on Facebook. We see hashtags all over the place. Each one unique to the brand – each one a phrase that only fans of the brand would know. These tactics not only get users to share content with friends and family, but it provides important market research to help improve the overall experience.

Make an early investment in social media marketing research because of it:

• Has a high ROI
• Provides immediate access to data
• Delivers results from all kinds of independent environments

The reason we see large businesses rely so heavily on social media because it’s just too powerful of a medium to ignore. It might please you to learn that small businesses can also benefit from social media marketing research. This post is dedicated to showing you how to use social media as a way to research your market.

Set Your Goals

The first step to any marketing campaign is that you must go into it with clear goals in mind. This post focuses on the research side so the questions you want answers will look something like this:

• What exactly are you planning to research? A product? Consumer Behaviour? Customer service?
• What type of data should you gather – quantitative or qualitative?
• What metrics will help you define this?
• What social media platforms will you use to gather data?

Get the Correct Tools

You need to find the right tools in order to meet the goals of your marketing research campaign. Find tools that help you mine the right channels for mentions. You’ll need something that can mine through a lot of data in a short amount of time. One good example of a tool that can help is Unamo Social Media Monitoring. However, other monitoring programs are on the market that can be used to perform that same task.

Another thing to keep in mind is that some tools only allow you to monitor a single channel. You will likely be using multiple channels to meet your goals so these tools would be essentially worthless.

Choose the Best Keywords

Keywords shape your results so make sure you take the time to choose the best ones. If you have a brand, then you might try keywords that are based on a specific product or service. It should be as catchy as possible while still maintaining your brand’s identity.

Depending on your overall goals, the number and quality of keywords will vary. For example, television shows use hashtags related specifically to the show. This ensures that only viewers react to it, providing highly targeted research.

Organise the Data

Once your social media marketing campaign gains some traction, you will start to pull in a lot of data from different sources. That means you’ll need to organise it in order to create clarity. This process is known as data cleaning.

Data cleaning consists of identifying irrelevant or incomplete data and then modify your parameters so that it will reflect more accurate information.

Final Thoughts

The end goal of any business is to transform their social media market research into a well-developed strategy. Just remember that social media is only one tool in an ocean of innovative solutions. The advantage of platforms like Facebook and Instagram is that they allow businesses to interact with potential customers on a personal level. It’s all about building trust and establishing a relationship with your audience.

Jacob Haney is a content marketer presently working with Research Optimus, a business research outsourcing company. A writer by day and a reader by night, he is loathed to discuss himself in the third person but can be persuaded to do so from time to time.