Integrating Social Media into Marketing Research

We know social media is a good starting point for marketing research once a research need and question are established. But before diving into the social pool, we must answer three questions to determine how viable is social media data for the more extensive research.

1. Is there enough conversation in scale to draw insights?
2. What insights can social help gather?
3. How to integrate the data onto the research?

Social at Scale

First of all, we must figure out if there is enough interest in your brand or service to be able to gather data. Social needs scale to draw good insights. If your brand is too niche or there is not a lot of conversation around its industry or topic, you will run into trouble because there won’t be enough to sample. You want to evaluate one year of social media engagements either on social listening or your owned channels in an ideal scenario. I would not consider anything below 200 monthly mentions or engagements (unless you are okay with small engagement volumes being the norm). Ideally, these conversations would be spread out as evenly as possible throughout the month. Be careful with sudden spikes in conversation as you might be oversampling from one popular post versus taking even amounts of comments from all posts during a period. 

Gathering Social Insights

If the scale is present, we can determine what insights we can aim to mine and from which sources. The social media audience can be divided into two large groups. The owned channels audience are those who already follow and engage with our brand in its social profiles. Non-owned channels can be those belonging to competitors or consumers talking about your themes but not necessarily following. Here are some ideas on what we can gather from each: 

Qualitative vs. Quantitative?

Social media findings will be primarily qualitative due to the nature of the platforms, especially when using social listening or engagements from competitor social channels.

Quantitative data sources are mostly limited to polls available on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram Stories, and LinkedIn. Be wary of confirmation bias on your owned social channels. If your target audience is your followers, there should not be an issue.

Integrating the Data

Formulating a Hypothesis

Comments on social media are a good starting point to assess consumer sentiment or interest. At times a comment can incite more engagement from other consumers leading to threads we can “pull” and gain deeper insight with proper research. One way I experienced this was with a cocktail mixer brand. One consumer shared his recipe, and many other consumers shared their opinions and their take on it. As a result, the brand added the recipe to the website to gauge interest. Later, the brand researched the commercial viability of releasing a product variant to cater to that recipe and others like it.

Confirming Findings

Once formal research is completed, social media can help test and validate how audiences respond to the findings. Going back to the mixer example, once research confirms that the idea is solid, there are ways to go on social media to validate interest. Non-owned channels would be the best way to tease the product. Partnerships with beverage and cocktail or other audience-relevant content creators can measure interest in the new product. Doing the same on owned channels serves as a thank you nod versus actual feedback gathering since that group will be biased and love the new product.

Conclusion

Social media is an excellent source to gather ideas while designing a research study. Findings from the research study can later be confirmed on social media. If the target audience is social media and the study is primarily qualitative, social will be an excellent match for the research. Be always conscious of the pitfalls of social such as bias, sourcing, and audience sampling.