social media market research examples

• Employee Advocacy Drive social media results by engaging employees to promote content to their networks
• Social Media AI Save time with innovative AI features designed to save you time and effort
• Social Media Automation Streamline your social media management tasks with features designed to save time
• Social Media Analytics Measure ROI with detailed analytics on your employee's participation in your social media strategy
• Corporate Posting Plan, publish and schedule content to your company social media accounts
• Enterprise Functionality Engage employees across offices, departments and functions with robust enterprise features
• Discover Content Find engaging, fresh content to share on your company pages and with your employees
• Leaderboards & Gamification Empower and reward employees for involvement in your social media strategy
• Marketing Boost engagement on your social media posts and reduce reliance on ads
• Recruiting Draw in more qualified candidates at lower cost through social media
• Corporate Communications Implement effective controls around social sharing and get more eyeballs on the posts that matter
• Event Promotion Increase attendance at events at lower costs with easy to use social amplification features
• Sales Enable your sales team to drive leads, sell on social, and to build thought leadership

Education Product Support

• Blog Social media marketing tips
• Help Guide How to guides for all Clearview features
• Ebooks and Guides Download whitepapers and guides to improve results
• Contact [email protected] (800) 854-6735
• Webinars 30-60 min classes on social media & content strategy
• Training Weekly training to help you get the most out of Clearview

For the Month of May, Get 10% Off! | Book Demo

Terms: New customer promotion only. Valid for the first year only.

A Comprehensive Guide to Using Social Media for Market Research

Leveraging social media for market research offers businesses a direct window into the minds of consumers—who they are, what resonates with them, and how they perceive the brand. By examining data from social media, marketers can tailor their strategies for maximum impact, respond to changing consumer preferences, manage their brand’s reputation , and much more. 

In this article, we explore why social media should be a key component of your market research efforts. We also list actionable strategies to use during market research, guiding you toward making informed, data-driven decisions that fuel business growth. 

Why Use Social Media for Market Research ?

Using social media for market research is a great way to ensure your marketing efforts resonate with your target audience and drive the desired results. Here’s why integrating social media into your existing market research methods is a must: 

It Facilitates Data-Driven Decision-Making

According to The Harris Poll, nearly all executives agree that social insights are key to informed decision-making . By using social media for market research , you can better understand your target audience, including their buying patterns, behaviors, brand perceptions, and needs. This knowledge allows you to make informed decisions regarding marketing strategies, influencer partnerships, and other vital aspects of your operations. Ultimately, market research empowers you to make decisions based on data rather than guesswork, leading to better outcomes. 

It Offers Authentic Customer Sentiments

Social media is filled with unfiltered customer opinions, with 36% of consumers sharing their experiences with a brand or business online. By monitoring what people are saying, whether good or bad, you can understand how people genuinely feel about your brand, products, and services. This authentic feedback can be used to improve your products and services, mitigate risks, and identify new areas for growth. 

It Helps You Manage Your Reputation

Leveraging social media for market research helps you stay attuned to customer sentiments about your brand or business. By monitoring conversations, mentions, and interactions online, you can take control of your reputation, identify potential PR crises, and take proactive measures to maintain your image. 

Key Strategies for Leveraging Social Media for Market Research

Using social media for market research offers various opportunities for businesses seeking to understand their customers better. Here are some strategies to guide you:

Use Social Listening 

Conducting market research on social media provides an opportunity to listen in on conversations about your brand and the industry you’re in. Use social listening tools to keep tabs on what customers are talking about, what they like and don’t like, and what they expect from you. Actively monitoring discussions is crucial for crafting relevant content and adapting strategies to changing preferences. 

One of the most powerful social listening tactics involves tracking brand mentions. This social media market research strategy enables marketers to receive notifications whenever their brand—or any other relevant keywords—is mentioned across social channels. It’s a vital tool for monitoring customer opinions, identifying pain points, and managing brand perception. 

Monitor Company Mentions in Real Time

Clearview Social’s content discovery tool lets you scan the internet for industry updates or mentions of your brand in real time. Uncover useful or positive content your teams can share to enhance your advocacy campaigns.

Monitor Key Metrics to Ensure Content Resonates

Social media moves fast, so consistent tracking is key. In conducting market research, employ social media analytics tools to gain insights into the types of content that resonate most with your customers. Track key engagement metrics like view counts, clicks, impressions, shares, engagement, and other KPIs to determine which marketing messages get the most traction. This allows you to fine-tune your content creation efforts, making sure that each post captures and holds your audience’s attention.

Simplify Social Media Analysis with Clearview Social

Discover which posts have the highest (or lowest) levels of engagement with our AI-powered tool. We provide the data you need to refine your strategy and achieve success.

Keep an Eye on Your Competitors

It’s crucial to closely monitor your competitors’ moves. By keeping an eye on their activities, you can gain valuable insights to strengthen your own initiatives.

Competitor intelligence on social media entails “eavesdropping” on your rivals. Monitor your top competitors’ social profiles—scrutinize their content, study their ad strategies, and assess audience responses to their posts. 

Furthermore, conduct a thorough comparison of your metrics with theirs—if they outperform you in key metrics like views, likes, and follows, consider it as your cue to revisit your strategy. Take inspiration from their success and restructure your social media efforts to align more closely with theirs.

Conduct Social Surveys and Polls 

Want to know what your customers want? Social media offers a direct line to your audience, allowing you to gain insights into their evolving interests—so why not ask them outright? This tactic for market research on social media may be simple, but it's one of the most effective approaches. 

Leverage polls, social media surveys, and questionnaires to extract insights that can enhance your content strategy. These instruments not only provide near-immediate feedback collection, but they also make customers feel valued, further strengthening their loyalty to your brand. 

Extract Data From Employee Advocacy Campaigns 

Empowering your employees as brand advocates not only boosts your reach but also turns their shared posts into a source of valuable data. Each time employees share posts about the company, extract data and combine them with insights gathered from other sources. This provides you with a comprehensive view of customer sentiment, campaign effectiveness, and more.

With this extensive pool of data, you can fine-tune your social media strategies with precision.

Get to Know Your Audience Better with Clearview Social

Harnessing social media for market research offers the opportunity to understand your audiences, allowing for strategic decision-making.  

To streamline your market research efforts on social media , consider integrating Clearview Social into your toolkit. Our comprehensive suite of features empowers you to monitor company mentions in real time and track essential metrics such as clicks and shares. Plus, our employee advocacy software facilitates the convenient sharing and amplification of company posts. With an abundance of data at your disposal, you can gain a clearer, more accurate picture of your market. 

Level Up Your Market Research With Clearview Social

Request a demo to learn more about our solutions and begin leveraging audience data for success. 

Sprinklr Service

Sprinklr Social

Works Best With

Sprinklr Insights

Sprinklr Marketing

Marketing Teams

Customer Service Teams

• Unified-CXM
• Customers Customer Stories Sprinklr Champions Sprinklr Community
• Company Our Story Leadership Newsroom Partners Careers Investor Relations Security & Data Privacy Sustainability
• Resources Learn Services Support Sprinklr Social ROI Estimator AI Maturity Assessment CX-WISE Analyst Reports Product Demo Days eBooks & Reports Events & Webinars Blog Unified-CXM Guide Forbes Influential CMO 2024 Our Services Training For Agencies Help Center Release Notes Contact Us

The undisputed leader in social media management

For over a decade, the world’s largest enterprises have trusted Sprinklr Social for its in-depth listening, unmatched channel coverage, enterprise-grade configurability and industry-defining AI.

7 ways to use social media for market research

Market research plays a vital role in helping businesses understand consumer preferences, industry trends and new opportunities. However, in the digital age, traditional market research methods are becoming less effective due to information overload and the need for real-time decision-making and instant feedback. To adapt to this fast-paced digital landscape, businesses should make the most of social media's transformative power.

In this blog, you'll learn the importance of social media market research, and understand the impact it can have on your business and explore various methods for effective research and its overall limitations. 

What is social media market research?  

Why should you conduct social media market research  , benefits of using social media for market research  , how to use social media for market research  , limitations of using social media for market research  , time to take action to improve marketing growth  .

Social media market research involves using social media platforms to gather and analyze data related to a brand, product or industry. It combines data analysis, consumer psychology and digital marketing strategy for a comprehensive approach. 

It encompasses a wide range of activities, from monitoring brand mentions and tracking hashtags to conducting social media sentiment analysis and identifying key influencers. Harnessing the power of social media data can empower business to lead and make informed, data-driven decisions. 

Social media market research is essential for the following reasons: 

• Understanding your audience: Understanding your audience is crucial for effective marketing. By gaining insights into their preferences, behaviors and demographics, you can tailor your efforts to resonate with them, resulting in better outcomes and increased success. 
• Industry trends: Staying up to date about industry trends and emerging market opportunities will help you to adapt and innovate effectively. 
• Real-time insights: Using real-time social data will help you make more informed decisions and adapt to market changes in no time. 

  Learn More: Strategies for social media growth  

Social media has transformed the way we understand and connect with our target audiences , providing real-time analysis of user behavior. This allows businesses to adapt to the ever-changing consumer psychology. The subsequent points underscore the profound impact of leveraging social media for market research. 

Real-time feedback

Social media enables businesses to promptly gather and address customer feedback, allowing you to quickly adapt to changing preferences. This real-time capability gives your businesses an edge over time-consuming traditional market research methods, like surveys and focus groups.  

Competitor analysis   

It provides valuable insights about your competitors, revealing opportunities and threats. By monitoring their social media activity, you can discover their marketing strategies, customer engagement tactics and product launches. Stay one step ahead by leveraging this information.  

Audience segmentation  

You can segment your audience effectively through data analytics, ensuring successful targeted marketing efforts. Social media platforms offer demographic and psychographic data, allowing you to create highly personalized campaigns that resonate with specific audience segments. 

Content optimization  

Analyze your social media data to refine your content strategies so they better resonate with your audience. Understand which content works well and which topics generate the most engagement to create impactful content. 

Crisis management  

Detecting issues and crises early is crucial if you want to protect your brand's reputation. Social media is often the first place where problems arise, such as negative customer feedback or viral misinformation. By staying alert on these platforms, you can quickly and efficiently address any issues that arise.  

Deep Dive: Impact of social media marketing on businesses  

Now that we have a good understanding of the fundamentals of social media market research, let's explore seven valuable methods and techniques to extract actionable insights. These methods will enable you to make informed decisions and adapt your strategies in response to real-time data.  

Social listening    

Social listening involves monitoring social media channels for mentions, reviews and ratings of your brand, products or industry-related keywords. It can reveal valuable insights, such as emerging trends, customer pain points and sentiment data. By identifying common themes and sentiments in user-generated content (UGC) , you can adapt your marketing strategies and product offerings accordingly. 

Tools like Sprinklr Social help you act on the reviews and ratings submitted by users. With such a tool, you can quickly respond to negative reviews and further highlight positive customer reviews to increase brand loyalty. 

Surveys and polls  

To create surveys and pools, use Twitter and Instagram's built-in features. These are excellent tools for collecting quantitative data and gauging public opinion. Surveys and polls are a direct way to engage with your audience and gather specific feedback on products, services or marketing campaigns. 

When crafting surveys, focus on clear and concise questions to ensure accurate responses. Additionally, make use of the social data analysis tools provided by these platforms to extract meaningful insights from the responses. 

Customer engagement analysis  

Analyzing your customer's engagement with your social media content is crucial for understanding their preferences and behavior. By studying how your audience interacts with your posts, you can gain insights into what resonates with them and what doesn't. This data helps in tailoring your marketing strategies to align with your audience's interests. 

Additionally, monitoring customer engagement metrics can help you identify patterns and trends in their online behavior. These insights can be instrumental in creating content and campaigns that not only resonate with your audience but also drive meaningful interactions and conversions. 

Related Read: Influencer marketing strategies to improve engagement  

Sentiment analysis   

Sentiment analysis tools analyze social media mentions to determine how your brand is perceived. They categorize mentions as positive, negative or neutral, enabling you to track sentiment trends over time.  

This analysis can uncover hidden issues or opportunities. For instance, an increase in negative sentiment can be an early warning sign of a problem that needs immediate action. Using sentiment analysis helps you better understand and respond to customer perceptions in the digital landscape. 

On the other side, a surge in positive sentiment indicates the success of your marketing campaigns or product launches. Use this opportunity to strengthen your brand's reputation. These insights allow you to adapt and refine your strategies in real time, ensuring a positive trajectory for your brand. 

Hashtag analysis  

Track relevant hashtags to uncover trending topics and discussions in your industry. This can guide your content creation and marketing strategies. Hashtags are more than just trendy buzzwords — they serve as gateways to specific conversations and communities within social media platforms. 

To analyze hashtags effectively, focus on usage volume, content types and sentiment. This data will help you in aligning your content with trends and in engaging a wider audience. Create and promote branded hashtags to encourage user-generated content and foster a sense of community. Use relevant and trending hashtags strategically to establish your brand as a thought leader, boosting visibility and authority in your industry. 

Competitive analysis   

Conduct a thorough analysis of your competitors' social media activities, including their content, engagement rates and audience demographics. This will uncover opportunities for you to excel. Use this competitive analysis to set realistic goals and measure your progress against industry peers. 

When conducting social media competitor analysis , focus on identifying gaps in your competitors' strategies that you can fill. By recognizing areas where your competitors may be falling short, you can develop innovative approaches that resonate with your audience and set you apart in the market.  

In addition, stay alert to emerging competitors or trends in your industry to stay ahead. The business landscape is constantly changing, so monitoring new players or trends will help you adjust your strategies for long-term success. 

Content analysis  

Content analysis involves examining metrics such as likes, shares, comments, click-through rates and conversion rates to assess the effectiveness of your content. Analyze the performance of your content to identify the posts that generate the most engagement and replicate those successful strategies.  

By identifying patterns in the content that resonates most with your audience, you can optimize your social media content calendar and create more of what your followers love. A tool like Sprinklr Social can help you understand your audience by gathering data from social signals, audience profiles and engagement metrics. It also assists you in targeting the right audience at the right time. 

This iterative process of refinement ensures that your content remains fresh and engaging while aligning with your audience's evolving interests and preferences. Furthermore, remember to get direct feedback from your audience through surveys or polls, as their insights can provide invaluable guidance for your content strategy adjustments. 

Read More: 11 tips for a unified social media messaging strategy  

While social media market research offers numerous benefits, it's important to acknowledge its limitations: 

Limited demographic representation   

Social media users can provide biased insights and may not fully represent your entire target audience. For example, if you notice high engagement in outdoor activities content, such as The North Face's hiking posts, on Facebook Insight, it doesn't necessarily reflect the entire audience. It might indicate that a segment of the audience is interested in hiking and adventure. 

Solution: To get a complete understanding of your audience, combine social media data with surveys and focus groups. This will give you a more comprehensive view. 

Keep in mind that different demographics have different levels of activity on social media. For instance, if your target audience is mostly older adults, they may not be as active on platforms like Snapchat or TikTok. 

Data privacy concerns  

Collecting and analyzing user data must comply with privacy regulations, like the GDPR.   

Solution: Implement robust data protection measures and seek user consent when necessary.  

Tools: Many social media listening tools offer data anonymization features, allowing you to analyze trends without violating user privacy. 

It's crucial to strike a balance between data collection and privacy to maintain trust with your audience. Communicate your data usage policies to users and respect their preferences regarding data sharing. 

Noise and clutter   

Social media is filled with irrelevant and spammy content, which can make data analysis challenging.  

Solution: Employing advanced filtering and data cleansing techniques can help sift through the noise.   

Tools: Machine learning algorithms and natural language processing can help identify and prioritize relevant content. Use sentiment analysis to filter out irrelevant mentions that may skew your insights.  

By focusing on high-quality data, you can ensure the accuracy of your findings. 

Learn More: Social media reports: A basic-to-advanced level guide  

Social media market research is invaluable for modern businesses seeking to understand their audience, competitors and the industry landscape. By utilizing tools like Sprinklr Social, you can grasp the intricacies of social media platforms and employ analytics tools to decipher patterns and trends. This will enable you to conduct real-time market research and adapt to the evolving needs of the digital audience. 

With its comprehensive suite of services, Sprinklr provides the tools and analytics needed to gather valuable insights and make informed decisions. From tracking social media engagement to analyzing customer sentiment, Sprinklr allows businesses to harness the power of social media for effective market research. Book a personalized demo of Sprinklr today! 

Get the social management tool that does it all

Easily create and schedule posts, publish at the best times, and maximize your social engagement across 10+ channels.

• Conversion Optimization
• Growth Marketing
• Digital Analytics
• Brand Marketing
• Digital Marketing
• Digital Psychology
• Ecommerce Marketing
• Product Marketing
• Technical Content Marketing
• Technical Marketing
• Google Analytics 4
• Browse all courses
• CXL Features
• Bottom-of-funnel SEO strategies in tough niches
• Growing AppSumo to 80m with performance marketing
• Account based marketing
• Building a growth process
• Building an innovative product
• Growth mindset: growth vs traditional marketing
• GrowthMaster Training Workshop
• Marketing strategy
• Optimizing Your Growth Process
• Partner Marketing
• Project Management for Marketers
• Retention: the most underrated growth channel
• User-centric marketing
• Data-driven influencer marketing
• Messaging strategy in public relations
• Sales Copywriting & Product Messaging
• Content marketing research
• Content recycling
• Email Marketing: Fundamentals
• Organic Social Media
• Product Marketing Content
• Scaling Content Marketing
• Content strategy and SEO for lead generation
• Growth Focused SEO testing
• On-Page, On-Site & Programmatic SEO
• SEO Link Building
• SEO-Driven Editorial Calendar
• Technical SEO
• Advanced Facebook Ads
• Advanced LinkedIn Ads
• Facebook Ads Creative
• Facebook Ads Experimentation
• Facebook Ads for Beginners
• Google Ads Experiments
• Google Ads for Beginners
• Linkedin Experimentation
• GA4 Intermediate
• Google Analytics 4 for beginners
• Preparing for Your GA4 Implementation
• Special Topics in GTM for GA4
• Attribution
• Data presentation and visualization
• Excel and Sheets for marketers
• Transactional data analysis
• Advanced Google Tag Manager
• Google Tag Manager for Beginners
• The Measurement Matrix
• Advanced Experimentation Masterclass
• CRO Agency masterclass
• Experimentation program management
• Intro to CRO and Experimentation
• Heuristic Evaluation
• Strategic Research for Experimentation
• User research
• Voice of Customer data
• A/B testing foundations
• A/B testing mastery
• CRO for Ecommerce Growth
• Good Practices
• Statistics for A/B testing
• Statistics fundamentals for testing
• Testing Strategies
• Digital psychology & behavioral design
• Intermediate statistics
• Landing Page Optimization
• People & Psychology
• Personalizing for conversion
• Brand strategy
• Positioning
• Radical differentiation
• Integrated Public Relations and SEO
• Storytelling
• Audience building
• Community building
• Community strategy
• Brand tracking 101
• Brand tracking with Momentive
• Customer storytelling and proof
• Segmentation and Persona Research
• Building a marketing agency
• Managing a remote marketing team
• Marketing Management
• Sales and customer success enablement
• Automation with Apps script
• Data collection on the web
• Data extraction
• Mobile Analytics
• Tag managers
• Python for marketers
• R for marketers
• SQL for marketers
• API Applications
• Cloud computing concepts
• Cloud services
• Machine learning applications
• Machine learning fundamentals
• Attention Basics
• Decision Making and Emotions
• Learning and Memory
• Building Habits and Loyalty
• Building Trust
• Cognitive Biases
• Nonconscious Motivation
• Principles of Persuasive Design
• Facebook Ads for ecommerce
• Google Ads for Ecommerce
• Google Shopping
• Selling on Amazon: Perfecting Traffic and Conversions
• Ecommerce Content Marketing
• Ecommerce SEO
• Email and SMS Marketing for Ecommerce
• Customer experience for ecommerce
• Customer journey for ecommerce
• Customer segmentation for ecommerce
• Retention and Customer Lifetime Value
• Ecommerce brand strategy
• Ecommerce merchandising
• Personalization for ecommerce
• Promotional events
• Selling on Marketplaces
• Ecommerce data and metrics
• Ecommerce forecasting
• Ecommerce tech stack
• Unit economics for ecommerce
• Competitive intel & market research
• Introduction to product marketing
• Positioning and company storytelling
• Pricing and packaging
• Product Analytics
• Analyst relations
• Product launches
• Hiring product marketers
• Working with the product team
• What is included in All-access
• First time here? See all resources
• Original research studies
• AB test calculator
• Conversion rate optimization guide
• Conversion optimization guide
• Ecommerce best practices
• Bounce rate guide: The foundations
• Clickthrough rate guide: The foundations
• Follow our B2B strategy podcast
• Sign up now

How to Use Social Media for Market Research

Social media isn’t a perfect source of market research: It’s not a representative sample and, for small businesses, it’s simply too small of a sample. For proper B2B market research, use these tools .

But for large organizations, social media is still critical. Why? because it includes your most passionate fans.

It’s also a rare source of candid consumer opinion: 80% of social media posts are about ourselves, and those opinions and beliefs—expressed individually and within a community—are not interrupted or biased by participation in a formal study or company-run focus group.

Further, consumers crave communication with brands on social media:

• 95% of adults between the ages of 18 and 34 are likely to follow a brand through social media channels.
• Buyers report spending 20–40% more money on brands that have interacted with them on social media.
• 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to friends and family.

Not all social media market research comes from active participation. When GE Life Sciences wanted to learn how customers discussed protein purification, they analyzed 500,000 protein-related comments on social media. The data improved content creation, tailored website vocabulary to the voice of the customer , and honed their search strategy.

To conduct similar market research successfully on social media, you need to know:

• What social media is good (and bad) at assessing;
• Which social platforms are best for research;
• How to encourage an informative and engaging conversation.

Table of contents

What is social media good (and bad) at assessing, market research methods on social media, how to use facebook for market research, how to use twitter for market research, how to use instagram for market research.

Social media is a useful market research tool to:

• Get immediate feedback on customers’ experiences and beliefs.
• Ask consumers about potential product improvements.

Other methods are more useful if you want to:

• Get in-depth feedback.
• Target a specific audience within or outside your social media following.

A few benefits—and pitfalls—stand out:

You can gather data faster. Almost half of social media users access different platforms on a daily basis:

That means that companies can get fresh insights quickly. One case study revealed that social media was three times as efficient compared to tracking customer feedback via email.

You can save on research costs. Most in-app social media features (e.g. polls, emoji sliders) collect market research data without the costs associated with research panels (with the aforementioned caveat that your audience isn’t a representative sample).

But it’s not for everyone. If your social accounts don’t have hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of followers, don’t expect social media to be a viable source of market research.

If you generate 20 responses to a poll, that quantitative feedback is equally likely to mislead you as to guide you in the right direction. You’re better off focusing on qualitative methods that will help you develop rich customer personas with a small number of responses.

There is, however, one opportunity for small businesses: social listening on competing brands. If you want to understand the frustrations or desires of your target audience, use passive social media market research techniques, like those detailed below, to get access to some of the same social media research larger competitors enjoy.

Also, beware of the herd mentality. Social media users are prone to impulsive behavior , and people often model others’ behavior, which may lead to copying others’ actions on social media and reducing data accuracy (especially if, for example, poll results are visible before someone votes).

For those that can take advantage of it, there’s a dual benefit to social media market research: You gain data while also building a connection with customers.

When you let customers express their thoughts, you strengthen an emotional bond, and those who are “fully connected” with your company are 52% more valuable :

So what are the primary methods of social media market research?

Three qualitative research approaches fit social media:

• Qualitative content analysis (number of likes/comments/shares). The number of Likes can be a vanity metric, but assessing the engagement rate of consumers on social media may suggest the attractiveness of a marketing message or product.
• Social listening. Passively gather feedback from your customers or monitor opinions about your brand or competitors.
• Polls/questions. Ask questions directly in social media feeds, encouraging users to share thoughts and feelings.

Here are the channels best suited to those approaches.

Which social media channels to use for market research

It makes sense to tailor your social media presence to the platforms where your audience spends time—those with the strongest followings are also your ideal platforms for research.

The State of Social report , not surprisingly, suggests that most brands use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram:

Below are strategies and tactics to conduct social media market research on each platform.

Around 97% of B2B and B2C companies use Facebook, which offers four main ways to conduct qualitative research:

• Call-to-action posts
• Brand mentions

On Facebook, posts that ask questions receive more Likes than any other type of post. It doesn’t require much time or effort to create a poll on Facebook , get valuable feedback, and analyze your data.

Not every poll needs to maintain the serious tone of academic research. For example, Starbucks created a poll about order preferences that generated 2,267 likes and 1,660 comments in 24 minutes. (Having a Facebook page with 37 million followers doesn’t hurt.)

While the post succeeded in generating engagement—a useful result apart from research—it also offered clues to how their customers perceive themselves and the language that may or may not resonate in a marketing campaign.

Facebook polls are still an option for organizations with smaller followings. The SaaS Growth Hacks group , for example, has just 12,200 members, but a poll on preference for conference call software generated over 100 responses in less than a day:

2. Contests

A chance to win a prize can motivate fans to provide their email addresses, send you user-generated content (e.g. photos, videos, testimonials), or offer valuable feedback about your product.

In partnership with Pinkbike, GoPro ran a “Best Line” contest with a $15,000 prize. Contest participants had to create and edit a video based on their experience, providing hours of compelling footage that both companies could market as authentic experiences with their products.

That same footage also provided insight about who their most fervent supporters were, how they used the equipment, and the most compelling narratives that customers built around the use of the product.

3. Call-to-action posts

In honor of a new product launch, M&M’s announced three flavors in a post with a call to action to ask followers to leave their thoughts in the comment section:

Notably, M&M’s made a simple poll into an open-ended question : Rather than simply gathering quantitative data, they got thousands of responses that reflected the strength of consumer sentiment and offered new content ideas, like developing a recipe that uses jalapeno M&M’s for “monster” cookies or promoting a game of M&M-based roulette:

4. Brand mentions

The most valuable insights may come from those who don’t follow your brand. Some 96% of those who discuss brands online do not follow the brands’ profile.

As Kristin Smaby explains , customers want to share their stories about brands, even if that conversation is indirect:

When customers share their story, they’re not just sharing pain points. They’re actually teaching you how to make your product, service, and business better.

One Facebook post that tags a brand can trigger an avalanche of related feedback, something ASOS experienced:

Keeping track of brand mentions—passively gathered feedback—is possible with social media monitoring tools like Mention , Brandwatch , Meltwater , Digimind Social , Brand24 , Radarly , and others .  

With its 280-character limit, Twitter is an efficient source of market research. There are two primary ways to collect qualitative data:

• Social listening

1. Social Listening

Monitoring digital conversations, also known as social listening, is a method of observing customers’ behavior to learn about their thoughts regarding a company or product.

Take BellaBrava , a chain of pizza restaurants with a focus on healthy living. When the company wanted to open a new restaurant in Europe, they created a list of keywords that reflected their values (e.g. “plant-based”, “spelt flour”, “veggie”) and monitored people who were talking about pizza and pizzerias on Twitter and other social channels.

With about 450,000 relevant records, BellaBrava drilled down to 10 potential locations with the strongest market in which to open a new restaurant.

Twitter polls are time-limited: They end between 5 minutes and 7 days after being posted, depending on the duration set by the creator.

Once your poll is over, results can be viewed publicly, and the winning choice is shown in bold. All participants receive a common push notification from Twitter. (Companies have no control over the content of those push notifications.)

Thus, Twitter polls have a dual purpose: Creating social media engagement and offering market research. Taco Bell uses simple Twitter polls to monitor fans’ preferences:

Another poll asked followers to choose from three options :

However, avid fans didn’t limit themselves to these choices, and they started suggesting ideas in the comment section. Taco Bell later tested a variation of a new product based on those Twitter comments:

Among other use cases that Twitter highlights are polls to gather opinions about trending events in real time:

In the case of Drybar, a salon chain, the poll is an opportunity to tap into a moment of heightened interest in hairstyles. For other companies, like a pizza chain, a pre-game poll on topping preferences could help shape the ideal offer.

Instagram has over 1 billion users , including company accounts for some 25 million businesses. There are three primary methods to collect market data on Instagram:

• Question stickers and polls
• Emoji slider

1. Question stickers

The Instagram Stories feature, with ephemeral content that vanishes within 24 hours, has achieved 500 million daily users . Since this content has a short lifespan, the “FOMO effect” can motivate users to pay attention and take action faster.

In July 2018, Instagram added question stickers —succinct, one-question polls for Stories. Users can not only vote but also see real-time results (admittedly, a risk for biasing feedback, too).

Within its social media mix, Sephora uses Instagram for “ quick eye candy ,” encouraging followers to vote on cosmetic choices and brands by embedding polls within their Instagram Stories:

2. Emoji slider

Instagram released the emoji slider in May 2018, adding a layer of emotional context to consumer feedback within the platform. Posts with emojis have a 15% higher interaction rate

ASOS allows followers to rate their products using an emoji slider, giving the company richer feedback than what it might get from binary polls—the sliding scale suggests a relative intensity of opinion.

For brands deploying polls, a swipe up delivers a list of participants and their answers, along with the average answer:

3. Brand mentions

Like all large companies, Whole Foods constantly manages a barrage of satisfied and dissatisfied customers on Instagram—sometimes within the same post. Not surprisingly, unhappy customers hasten to complain about their experience:

As with Facebook and Twitter, comment sections in Instagram are ready sources to mine consumer feedback, even from social media users who don’t follow your brand.

If you’re not a big brand, influencer campaigns can generate the brand mentions (i.e. source material) for market research. Actively asking for feedback as part of an influencer campaign increase the value of the investment: You get awareness and a trove of consumer feedback.

(While “influencer marketing” may seem blasé, it’s not going away: The worldwide Instagram influencer market value is estimated to be $2.38 billion in 2019; Instagram is used in 79% of all influencer campaigns ; and 67% of marketers plan to increase their influencer marketing budgets in the next 12 months, particularly on Instagram.)

In 2018, Tommy Hilfiger invited Lewis Hamilton to launch a capsule collection. In partnership with the brand, Lewis worked on product design and published Instagram posts with a relevant hashtag and product tag. Since Lewis has a large, engaged following, his posts create a buzz—and an opportunity for the brand to get customer feedback.

A photo from the designer collection launch in Japan yielded 148,612 likes, but it also broached the idea of a collaboration with Net-a-Porter :

Of course, if you’re not one of the world’s most well-known fashion labels, you may have trouble securing a collaboration opportunity with one of the world’s top Formula 1 drivers.

The rise of “micro-influencer” campaigns —those targeted at local influencers with small but loyal followings—offers more opportunities for emerging brands focused on social media growth.

Even if you’ve never bothered to look, the most popular social media sites—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—have data about your customers. While that data is not a representative sample of your total customer base, it is a source of unvarnished opinions from passionate fans.

If you want to get an understanding of their reasons, opinions, and motivations to buy or not buy your product, social media is a rich, public source of market research material.

There are six common methods for gathering qualitative data on social media, many of which are possible on multiple social channels:

• Polls (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)
• Contests (Facebook)
• Call to action posts (Facebook)
• Brand mentions (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)
• Question Stickers (Instagram)
• Emoji slider (Instagram)

Related Posts

Most conversation about social media strategy sucks. Write compelling headlines, use interesting photos, follow "influencers"…

According to a report by Nielsen on social media, Americans spend three times more time…

What is social commerce? Social commerce is the ability to make a product purchase from…

We are always striving to boost conversion rates and encourage users to engage more. Forward-looking…

Hugh Beaulac

Hugh Beaulac is a data-driven content strategist with over six years of experience in social media marketing. He believes in the power of social media and uses these platforms to learn more about potential clients. Follow him on Twitter .

Join the conversation Add your comment

Hi Peep. I fundamentally disagree with your first statement. Qualitative research is especially valuable for all businesses, particularly if you’re a smaller business. It’s how market research starts. Start with qual, look for key themes around attitudes and behaviours and the develop your quant instrument. Sample size has nothing to do with qual.

You’re right – qualitative research is highly important, and my idea is that social media is a good place for understanding the social reality of individuals. The main idea was that many researches don’t believe social media can be a credible source even though it’s a place for loyal (!) fans who are ready to express their thoughts.

Which statement of mine? I’m all for qualitative research.

If you refer to the blog article, it saying doing polls etc on social media will lead you astray as it’s a tiny sample size and not representative.

Comments are closed.

Current article:

Search posts.

• Acquisition (182)
• Brand Building (22)
• Business Building (109)
• Copywriting (42)
• CRO & Testing (316)
• Customer Stories (7)
• Digital Analytics (89)
• Marketing Tactics (50)
• Original Research (15)
• Psychology (81)
• Social Media (20)
• User Experience & Persuasive Design (179)

Subscribe to our newsletter.

Join 140,000+ marketers and get a weekly expert-led newsletter focused on helping marketing teams overcome growth challenges, punch above their weight, and crush their competition.

• Your e-mail *
• I agree to receive updates from CXL.
• Name This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Social Media Research: A Comprehensive Guide

Guv Callahan

May 20, 2024

8 min. read

Social media research helps you unlock the potential of social content for business. We’re living in a world where tweets hold power and likes shape perceptions. When you know what to publish and who you’re posting it for, you can construct a stronger strategy that helps you meet key goals.

Data isn’t just about numbers; it’s about uncovering narratives and following the breadcrumbs of likes, shares, and comments to gain deeper understandings. There’s a method to the madness of selfies and status updates. The right approach to social media research helps you learn more about the collective consciousness of society — and use it to your advantage.

Let’s explore the language of social media likes and shares and dig beneath the surface of our digital interactions.

What is Social Media Research?

Tools and techniques for social media research, understanding the difference: social media research vs. traditional research, harnessing the power of social media research for your business, ethics and privacy in social media research, success stories: real world examples of social media research.

Social media research is the process of using social media data to learn about trending topics, audiences, and content performance. Reviewing social data gives you quantitative insights (e.g., engagement rates , best posting times ), but it can also lead to qualitative learnings like human behaviors, preferences, and opinions.

When conducting social media research, companies can look for patterns and sentiments to drive their social media marketing strategy. They can decide what content to create, which channels to post on, how to reach their audience, when to post content, and a myriad of other decisions that will lead to faster results.

There’s no single best way to do social media research. You can manually review engagement on your posts or look at your competitors’ content. Or you can use third-party social listening tools to aggregate social data for you. 

Social media research can be formal (like a traditional research project) or informal. You might have a certain goal in mind, or you might not know what you’re looking for and just want to see what pops up. 

Let’s review some options.

Social media analytics

No matter what channels you choose, you can gain a wealth of insights from built-in social analytics. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter give you instant intel about your content performance and audiences. 

Even better, you don’t always need to know what you’re looking for. You can start combing through your analytics, then jot down questions or ideas you want to explore further.

Tip: Learn more in our blog The Complete Guide to Social Media Analytics .

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free and underrated tool that gives you unique angles and insights on a given topic. You can set up a Google Alert related to a keyword or topic of your choice, then receive a daily digest of articles published on that topic. 

From there, you can learn more about what other brands and businesses are publishing. Repurpose your findings into your social media content to get ahead of trends and topics. You can lead conversations instead of joining them after they blow up on social.

Social listening tools

Social listening tools like Meltwater let you be the fly on the wall in the social world. You can “listen” to what your audience is saying and truly be everywhere all at once. 

These tools monitor billions of publicly available data points across multiple social channels, like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. They help brands track mentions of their products or brand names in real time so you can become part of important conversations. 

You can also track topics related to your niche or learn more about what your audience is talking about beyond your brand. This gives you direct insight into their lifestyles so you can meet them where they are authentically.

Want to learn more about how Meltwater could help your social media research? Fill out the form below and an expert will be in touch!

Media intelligence tools

Taking social listening a step further, you can add media intelligence tools to the mix to learn what’s being talked about beyond social media. Meltwater’s media intelligence suite lets you monitor TV and radio channels, blogs, print media, and other new sources around the world.

This gives you more comprehensive insights into hot topics and trends that you can repurpose for social media. News-worthy events make their way to social media, giving you an easy “in” to your audience’s attention. 

Aside from the social-specific aspect, social media research holds a few advantages over traditional research. 

For starters, social research gives you real-time data that’s constantly changing. You can also get the most specific insights according to your audience and social channels, not just general info. This means you can shorten the research curve and get faster insights about topics that matter to you.  

By comparison, traditional research is often a more structured approach with specific goals in mind. It typically requires lots of sources and manual effort. It takes time to find and vet sources, cross-reference data, and ensure a high level of accuracy. 

Combining both types of research can give you the most comprehensive view of your audience.

Now that you know what social media research is, let’s explore some ways you can apply it to your business.

Identify your target audience

Analyzing social media data can help you pinpoint who your target audience is (because it’s not always who you think). You might have your audience defined on the surface with basics like age, gender, and geographic location, but social research can dig several layers deeper to uncover new audience segments you haven’t considered. 

Audiences evolve all the time. Their preferences, needs, and interests change. This means that who you want to reach today might not be the same person you want to connect with in the future. Constantly finding new things about your audience will help you continue generating content that captures their interests.

Improve brand reputation

Monitoring online conversations and feedback gives companies a direct path to reputation management . You can more easily spot when trouble might be brewing so you can act fast and defend against hits to your brand image.

Proactively engaging with customers on social platforms shows that the company values their opinions and is committed to providing excellent customer service. This not only builds trust and loyalty but also strengthens the brand's reputation as a customer-centric organization.

Optimize social media marketing campaigns

When you know more about your audience and past content performance, you’re in a better position to create better posts that resonate. Learn what type of content your audience prefers based on engagement metrics. Tailor your content and messaging to reflect their interests and needs.

You’ll also have insights about what’s hot in the social media world. You can use these trends as the foundation for your own content, taking the guesswork out of what you should talk about. 

Tip: Learn more about tailoring your content and messaging in our Personalization at Scale Guide !

Collecting social media research from outside data sources brings ethics and privacy into question. Marketers should be proactive in asking where their data is coming from and how it was obtained. 

Ideally, you’ll choose tools that are in compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Know how they obtain data and whether they safeguard individual users’ information. Getting ahead of your competitors shouldn't be at the expense of your customers’ privacy or potential legal challenges.

Companies around the world use social media research to drive engagement, create better content, and grow their brand presence. 

Take Shiseido , for instance. This Meltwater customer uses our Explore solution to learn what makes their brand special across 120 markets. The company uses social listening to monitor competitors, unify social mentions in a single dashboard, and understand the brand’s presence on a global stage.

Another Meltwater customer, Fifty Acres , uses the platform to learn about relevant narratives happening on social media. Learning what others are talking about allows them to shape their own stories, pitch new ideas for business growth, and connect with people in the right places at the right times.

W Hotels in Singapore is another great example of social media research at work. The company uses Meltwater to learn more about what customers like when traveling, allowing them to create custom experiences in their hotels.

Last but not least, Mailchimp uses Meltwater to inform its content strategy. The company looks for trends and themes on social media that resonate with creators, allowing them to easily scale their content by making their audience go bananas over every post.

Learn more when you request a demo by filling out the form below.

Continue Reading

Personalization at Scale: Removing Guesswork from Consumer Research

Top Secondary Market Research Companies | Desk Research Companies

Customer Segmentation Models: Types, Benefits & Uses

The Ultimate Social Listening Guide - Never Miss a Social Mention

Insight-Driven Marketing, Your New Strategic Advantage

Home Blog Qualitative Research 9 effective ways to use social media for market research

9 effective ways to use social media for market research

What is social media market research?

1: use social listening, 2: use social media sentiment analysis, 3: boost your share of voice, 4: win at social data storytelling, 5: run competitive analysis reports, 6: research rivals’ social ad strategy, 7: track key social media metrics, 8: use social surveys and polls, 9: cross-reference social data, transform your market research with social media, how forsta can help.

For many people, social media isn’t just an add on. It’s at the center of their lives and almost a non-negotiable for everyday existence.

Latest figures show that  nearly 60% of the global population  use social media – and it gives us a window into their worlds.

We know that to understand a target audience’s needs and preferences, we need to go to where they are.

People are communicating with each other about things they love – and  really  hate – and everything else in between. They’re interacting with each other and with brands, all day long. They’re sharing their thoughts on almost every subject imaginable.

Using social media for research seems like a no-brainer. So, let’s find out how you can use it to get even closer to your target audience and supercharge your insight gathering.

Social media market research means collecting data and insights about your target market via the  social media platforms  they use.

These sites can be gleaned for powerful insights into vital issues like how your brand lands and how your messages come across. Plus, when it comes to what your competitors are up to, and how your industry is doing, they can be unbeatable.

All these actions can give a helping hand to boosting sales and engaging your client base.

That means using tools and data extraction techniques to gather quantitative data including likes and shares, as well as qualitative data like comments and posts.

So, which platforms have the most market research potential? Popular programs include:

• Twitter (recently rebranded to ‘X’)

Don’t forget customer review sites, either. They’re often packed full of nuggets to help you understand customers better. Count on places like:

• Google My Business and Trustpilot for small businesses
• Trip Advisor for the travel sector
• Glassdoor for employers

One more type of social media to add to the list? Forums. They’re a treasure trove for helping businesses understand trends around specific topics. (In fact, Forsta has tools designed to help you  gauge and manage your reviews  and customer comments.)

How to use social media for your market research

Let’s dive into some ways you can tap into social media for even better market research results.

What are your customers talking about when it comes to your brand? How do they feel about it?

Social listening means tracking  some key things across social media . The most powerful are conversations about your brand and mentions of your products or services.

These might also be keywords related to what you do, as well as hashtags containing your name or product.

Then add in the same things but for your competitors, too.

When it comes to pinpointing customer needs and pain points – all in real time – social listening ticks a lot of boxes.

This one is social listening, but with extras.

Calculating how customers feel towards your brand, product, or service – and why – is key. But that’s not just about likes, comments, shares and hashtags. Add in layers of emotions and that’s what sentiment analysis is about.

By  tracking mentions, then analyzing the data that’s been collected , you can get an understanding of how your audience interacts with or talk about your brand – and how they feel when they’re doing this.

There are specific sentiment analysis tools on the market to make it a whole lot easier.

End result of harnessing this data? Being able to magic up customer experiences that hit the spot every time.

Do you know how visible your brand is compared to your competitors? Draw upon powerful insights from what’s known as social share of voice.

Let’s say you dream of boosting brand awareness or increasing sales. Pre-social media, researchers might have defined share of voice as how successful your paid advertising was.

But now in a digital age what also counts is your online visibility in general. And that includes where your brand lands in search results as well as the mentions it gets on social.

Those juicy nuggets of insight you get from social media? They’re practically worthless if they can’t be shared – and understood, then used – by your wider team.

So, it’s crucial to be able to weave all the findings into compelling, easy-to-grasp narratives. Enter social data storytelling.

This is a way to transform data into gorgeous visualization assets. Think charts, graphs and word clouds that make it a snap to see how they relate to company-wide goals.

Having the right competitor intelligence helps you make smarter decisions.

And being able to analyze your competitors to see what others are doing better across their own social channels is all part of that.

Competitive analysis reports will also help you pinpoint gaps in your own social media strategy. Because it figures that if you know what their strengths and weaknesses are, you can see how they compare to your own.

Want to spy on your competitors’ social ads and strategy? Your luck’s in. Some social media platforms have their own ad libraries and they’re groaning with data.

These are fantastic resources for competitor analysis as they let you see things like which brands are advertising and the targeting they’ve used in their campaigns.

You can check out the  Facebook (Meta) ad library here . Tiktok now has an  ad library  too.

Social media platforms have analytics features built in. Getting the good stuff on audience engagement, demographics and content reach is a winner.

But this often calls for specialist tools. These can break down the type of content your brand has put out, and highlight which ones got the most views or traction.

Because you need to discover the specific types of content that makes your audience sit up and take notice. And anything that makes that a cinch is worth looking at.

Need a lightning-fast gauge on client preferences and pain points? Ask your audience directly.

Come on, don’t be shy. It’s all about harnessing the power of one-question surveys and micro polls.

For the consumer, you can bet that this kind of engagement brings them closer to feeling heard and connected.

And the feedback is very nearly instant, direct and feels way more natural than formal surveying. Even better when your brand craves knowing how people feel about current events, or the trending topics that matter to them.

Social media isn’t always a representative sample of a business’ audience.

That might be the case especially for smaller brands or those whose client base spends their time off- and not online.

So, to get safe, accurate insight from social media data you must do something else, too. And that’s cross-referencing and analyzing it with other tried-and-tested sources and channels.

Sampling, triangulation, verification, and contextualization all come into their own here.

There are so many golden prizes up for grabs when you use social media for market research.

Business as a whole agrees. Recent industry research suggests 90% of leaders believe that being able to use social media data and insights properly to inform their business strategy is crucial. So important, in fact, that they feel their company’s success depends on it.

It’s all about the audience. Not only will you understand yours better, but you’ll find a smoother path to engage with hard-to-reach audiences.

Sure, great insights come from people who follow your brand on social media. But most people who will discuss your brand online don’t actually follow it.

In a fluid digital landscape, brand reputation can be hard to manage. That makes real-time data-driven insights from social media research more crucial than ever.

Knowing how your target consumers think of your brand – and having the data to back it up – will prove itself to be a life saver. 

Businesses need to keep evolving, moving, changing. That’s true for their products and services, too.

Real-time research on social could lead to new products – or new feature requests suggested by customers (and passed onto the product team to add to the to-do list). That could also mean something simple like a discount to match competitors.

Most market research can take a while to plan and execute. But by incorporating social media into the mix, it can be done in just minutes or hours. All that, but with potentially an even greater pool of respondents than ever before.

Listening to the conversations that are happening around your brand will give you clear direction over where your company ought to be focusing its attention. But while you can’t be in all places at once, our software can.

Forsta’s Voice of Customer  (VoC) capabilities uncover the insights that matter. Whether you choose self-service or fully managed, our end-to-end platform illustrates the entire customer journey – helping you to understand what actions are going to impact your bottom line and equipping you with the tools to make change possible.

Spanning every channel and every device, our software reaches your audience where they are – before breaking down siloed data sources, consolidating all your data in one place, and showing you where to save time and money. And with interactive dashboards that allow you to track performance by product, region, or any category you care to think of, you can make decisions based on the most accurate customer and operational data.

Read to see how our technology can help you to hit profit growth, meet KPIs, and even make cost efficiencies?  Book your free demo , and let’s make CX work for your ops goals.

Related stories

Forsta shields against hackers and eradicates ghost completes with new s2s connection.

Forsta shields against hackers and eradicates ghost completes with new S2S connection August 27, 2024 LONDON — Leading market research technology developer Forsta has collaborated with top industry sample providers to eradicate fraudulent ‘ghost completes’ by launching a server-to-server (S2S) connection in Forsta Surveys, formerly known as Decipher. The new software ensures that survey findings […]

Forsta launches Retail HX offering to answer consumer call for cohesive omnichannel shopping experiences

Forsta launches Retail HX offering to answer consumer call for cohesive omnichannel shopping experiences May 9, 2024 LONDON — Forsta, the leading developer of Human Experience (HX) technology, has launched Retail HX, a set of data-driven insights solutions which unify retailers’ end-to-end customer, employee and brand data, enabling brands to stand out from competitors by […]

PG Forsta Named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Voice of the Customer

PG Forsta Named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Voice of the Customer PG Forsta recognized by Gartner as a Leader for the 2nd time in a row Chicago and London – February 5th, 2024 – PG Forsta, the leading provider of experience technology, data analytics, and insights that help companies better […]

Learn more about our industry leading platform

Forsta newsletter, get industry insights that matter, delivered direct to your inbox.

We collect this information to send you free content, offers, and product updates. Visit our recently updated privacy policy for details on how we protect and manage your submitted data.

12 Ways to Use Social Media Platforms for Market Research

• by Alice Ananian
• July 15, 2024

In today’s digital landscape, social media is far more than a hub for memes and keeping in touch with loved ones. For marketers and entrepreneurs, it’s a treasure trove of market insights waiting to be uncovered. 

If you’re navigating the world of marketing or building a small business, leveraging social media for market research can transform how you make decisions. In this blog, we’ll dive into the significance, advantages, techniques, and hurdles of using social media platforms to gather valuable market intelligence.

What Is Social Media Market Research and Why Is It Important?

Social media has become an undeniable force. It’s not just a platform for connecting with friends and family anymore; it’s a treasure trove of real-time consumer insights. This is where social media market research comes in.

Social media market research involves using these platforms to gather and analyze data related to your brand, product, industry, or target audience. It’s essentially eavesdropping on the online conversations happening around your niche. By deciphering these conversations, you can gain a wealth of knowledge about:

Customer preferences and needs  

What are people saying about your products or similar ones? What features are they raving about? What pain points are they constantly mentioning?

Emerging trends  

Social media is a hotbed for new trends. By keeping an eye on what’s gaining traction online, you can stay ahead of the curve and adapt your offerings accordingly.

Brand sentiment: How do people feel about your brand? Are they satisfied with your customer service? Are they excited about your latest product launch ? Social listening can reveal your brand’s reputation in the eyes of the consumers.

Competitor analysis: What are your competitors doing on social media? What kind of content are they creating? How are they interacting with their audience? By understanding your competitors’ strategies, you can identify their strengths and weaknesses and craft a more effective approach for your own brand.

In short, social media market research is important because it provides you with valuable, real-time data that can be used to inform all aspects of your business strategy – from product development and marketing campaigns to customer service and brand reputation management.

Benefits of Using Social Media for Market Research

Traditional market research methods like surveys and focus groups can be valuable, but they often come with drawbacks like cost, time constraints, and potentially inauthentic responses in controlled settings. Social media market research offers a dynamic alternative with several key benefits:

Cost-effective

Social media platforms themselves are free to use for research purposes. There are also many free social listening tools available, though more advanced features might require a paid subscription. Compared to the cost of recruiting participants for focus groups or surveys, social media research is a budget-friendly option.

Real-time Insights

 Social media conversations are happening constantly. You can gain immediate insights into what people are thinking and feeling, allowing you to react quickly to trends and adjust your approach as needed. Imagine wanting to understand the reception of a new product launch. Social media buzz will tell you if it’s generating excitement or falling flat, much faster than waiting for traditional research results.

Unfiltered Feedback

On social media, people are more likely to express their honest opinions without reservations. You can glean valuable insights into customer sentiment that you might not get through traditional methods. For instance, a customer frustrated with your service might leave a scathing review on Twitter (aka X), providing much more candid feedback than they might share in a survey.

Large, Diverse Sample Size

Social media boasts billions of users from all walks of life. This allows you to gather data from a much larger and more diverse audience than you could ever reach with traditional methods. Suppose you’re a clothing brand targeting young professionals. Social listening tools can help you understand the conversations and preferences of this demographic across various platforms.

Targeted Research

Social media lets you target your research very specifically. You can track mentions of your brand, specific keywords, or hashtags to gain insights into a particular niche or campaign.

In essence, social media market research allows you to tap into the unfiltered voice of the market, providing a constant stream of valuable customer insights at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.

How to Use Social Media for Market Research?

Social media is a powerful tool for market research, ready to tap into the treasure trove of data? Here’s how you can transform social media from a mere marketing channel into a valuable market research tool :

Identify Your Objectives 

Define what you want to achieve with your research. Your objectives could encompass understanding consumer sentiment, identifying market trends, or gathering feedback for a new product. Clearly outlining your goals will help focus your research efforts and ensure that you gather relevant data that supports your decision-making process.

Choose the Right Platforms

Different social media platforms offer unique insights. LinkedIn is ideal for B2B market research, providing professional networking and industry-specific content, while Instagram offers visual content insights that are invaluable for brands with a strong visual identity. Additionally, platforms like Twitter and Facebook can provide a broad range of consumer opinions and trends through their diverse user bases.

Identify Your Objectives 

Use social listening tools.

Leverage tools to monitor brand mentions and relevant hashtags across multiple platforms. Prelaunch.com’s AI Market Research Tool  goes beyond traditional social listening by utilizing AI to analyze competitor products on Amazon, including reviews, pricing, and features. This comprehensive approach allows you to gather a wide array of insights that can inform product development and marketing strategies.

Join Industry Groups and Forums

Participate in online communities such as LinkedIn groups, Reddit forums, and industry-specific message boards to tap into conversations between potential customers and industry experts. These discussions can provide valuable insights into emerging trends, customer pain points, and unmet needs in the market, helping you tailor your offerings to better meet consumer demands.

Conduct Surveys and Polls

Use built-in features on platforms like Twitter and Facebook to create surveys and polls. This direct method of gathering feedback can provide insightful data about customer preferences, opinions, and behaviors. Make sure to design your questions thoughtfully to elicit detailed and actionable responses.

Analyze User-Generated Content

Pay attention to reviews, comments, and posts from users across various social media platforms. This user-generated content can provide valuable insights into consumer behavior, product usage, and overall satisfaction. By understanding the context and sentiment behind these posts, you can identify areas for improvement and opportunities for innovation.

Monitor Competitor Activities

Keep an eye on your competitors’ social media activities to gain insights into their strategies, audience engagement, and market positioning. This can reveal market trends, differentiation opportunities, and potential gaps in the market that your business can exploit. Regularly reviewing competitor content will also help you stay informed about industry developments and emerging best practices.

Track Hashtags and Trends

Hashtags are a powerful tracking tool for conversations around specific topics. Use tools to identify popular hashtags in your industry and monitor their usage to stay updated on trending discussions, events, and themes. This can help you align your content and marketing efforts with current interests and build stronger connections with your audience.

Engage with Your Audience

Don’t just observe—engage actively with your audience. Respond to comments, participate in discussions, and ask follow-up questions to gain deeper insights. This interaction not only provides valuable data but also strengthens your relationship with your audience, fostering brand loyalty and trust.

Utilize Sentiment Analysis

Understand the emotional tone behind social media mentions through sentiment analysis tools. This analysis helps gauge public opinion, identify areas for improvement, and measure the impact of your campaigns. By monitoring sentiment over time, you can track changes in consumer attitudes and adjust your strategies accordingly.

Combine Qualitative and Quantitative Data

A blend of both qualitative and quantitative data offers a holistic view of consumer behavior and preferences. Qualitative data, such as detailed feedback and personal anecdotes, provides depth and context, while quantitative data, such as survey results and engagement metrics, offers measurable and comparable insights. Together, they provide a comprehensive understanding of your market.

Report and Act on Findings

Compile your findings into a comprehensive report, highlighting key insights, trends, and actionable recommendations. Use visual aids like charts and graphs to make your data more accessible and compelling. Share this report with relevant stakeholders and develop a plan to act on the insights, ensuring that your research leads to meaningful and impactful changes in your business strategy.

By adopting these strategies, the real-time data and insights gleaned can empower your decision-making process, influence your marketing strategies, and guide your overall business direction.

Challenges and Limitations of Using Social Media for Market Research

While social media offers a wealth of market research benefits, it’s important to acknowledge the challenges and limitations that come with it:

Sample Bias: Social media users are not a representative sample of the entire population. People who are more tech-savvy and active online are more likely to be heard. This can skew your data if your target audience is not heavily represented on these platforms.

Inaccurate or Incomplete Data: Social media is full of opinions, not always facts. People might express frustrations or excitement that don’t reflect reality. Additionally, users might not provide complete information about themselves or their experiences.

Sentiment Analysis Challenges: Social listening tools use sentiment analysis to gauge positive, negative, or neutral sentiment in conversations. However, these tools can struggle with sarcasm, irony, and slang. This can lead to misinterpretations of the true sentiment behind a post.

Privacy Concerns: Ethical data collection is crucial. Be mindful of privacy regulations and ensure you’re not scraping data in ways that violate user privacy.

Focus on the Present: Social media reflects current trends and opinions. It might not be the best tool for long-term forecasting or understanding long-standing customer needs.

Overcoming these Challenges:

Combine Social Media Research with Other Methods: Don’t rely solely on social media data. Combine it with traditional research methods like surveys and focus groups to get a more well-rounded picture.

Target Your Research Carefully: Focus on platforms and communities where your target audience is most active.

Look for Patterns, Not Anomalies: Don’t base decisions on single posts or comments. Look for recurring themes and patterns in the data to get a more accurate picture.

Use a Multi-Layered Approach: Use a combination of social listening tools, sentiment analysis, and manual review of conversations to get a deeper understanding of the data.

By acknowledging these limitations and taking steps to mitigate them, you can ensure that your social media market research provides valuable and actionable insights for your business.

Social media platforms offer a dynamic and cost-effective way to conduct market research. By leveraging these platforms, marketers, entrepreneurs, and small business owners can gain valuable insights into consumer behavior, market trends, and brand perception. However, it’s essential to be aware of the challenges and limitations associated with social media data.

Incorporate social media market research into your strategy to stay competitive and responsive to market changes. Ready to take your market research to the next level? Start by defining your objectives, choosing the right platforms, and utilizing social listening tools. Monitor hashtags, engage with your audience, and analyze user-generated content to gain a comprehensive understanding of your market.

Explore further resources and stay informed about the latest trends and tools in social media market research. Happy researching!

Alice Ananian

Alice has over 8 years experience as a strong communicator and creative thinker. She enjoys helping companies refine their branding, deepen their values, and reach their intended audiences through language.

Related Articles

Ecommerce Market Research in 2024: Step-by-Step Guide

• April 8, 2024

A Comprehensive Guide to Pet Industry Market Research

• June 25, 2024

Observe Summit 2024

Join us in Chicago on October 3rd for a day packed full of social listening awesomeness and to meet other social listeners in the wild!

What role does social media play in market research?

The online space is crowded, and more brands are vying for consumers' attention than ever before. Market research is becoming increasingly important in helping brands understand how to stand out from competitors and connect with their customers. That's why more are turning to social media to gather insights on their target audience.

What is social media market research?

Social media market research focuses on gathering information about specific audiences via online social channels. Whilst it's easy to focus on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, there are other places where people interact. For example, Reddit, Quora and specialised forums, as well as customer reviews sites and blogs. These are valuable sources of social data.

By analysing how people interact on these social channels, you can gain more insight into your audience: how they speak, their likes and dislikes, etc. Combining this with other market research methods, such as surveys and focus groups, helps build a much clearer picture of your customers and how they use your services.

[caption id="attachment_6848" align="alignnone" width="536"]

Reddit, Quora and specialised forums, customer reviews sites and blogs are all valuable sources of social data.[/caption]

What are the advantages of using social media for market research?

Unlike other methods of market research, which take place in controlled settings, people tend to be more open online. Without the feeling of being observed, they're likely to share their opinions more freely, providing more organic insight.

You can also gain insight faster. By continuously monitoring social channels and tracking mentions of certain words or topics, you can quickly assess their importance and adjust your strategy accordingly. More traditional methods, which require time and planning, often only capture one moment in time. This can limit its usefulness when you're looking to learn and progress quickly.

Social data can also answer questions you might not know needed asking. Monitoring people's behaviour on social media provides a lot of data. With this, you can begin to see trends and patterns that you might miss with more targeted forms of market research. This can feed into your overall business strategy . It might even help you to identify a completely new audience.

What are the challenges around analysing social data?

The same benefits of social media can also throw up a number of challenges. Although you can gain more organic insight away from a controlled environment, it's not uncommon for people to have a different persona on social media, especially on certain platforms. So, what they say and how they act online isn't always reflective of their behaviours in the real world.

And, although social media provides a lot of data, it's only valuable if you can extract insight from it. When you're working with big data, you need to know how to ask the right questions. This can require someone with a specialist skill set to be able to analyse the data properly.

There are a number of tools that can help you to make sense of the data , but it's important to understand their limitations. There are many nuances in language that can affect how something is interpreted. Whilst Web analytics tools help to filter through large amounts of information, it's important to incorporate human interpretation to get the most accurate results.

Examples of market research using social media

There are many use cases for social media based research, from identifying popular hashtags to increase the reach of your marketing campaigns, to measuring the success of a new product launch.

One great real-world case study comes from specialist equipment manufacturer, 3M. As one of the biggest providers of ventilators and medical grade personal protective equipment (PPE), their role during the early stages of COVID-19 pandemic was essential. They analysed social data to track mentions coming from frontline workers around the shortage of PPE . This information fed into the communications strategy, ensuring they could keep people informed around future availability in a clear and timely manner.

Another great example comes from Walmart. Again, during the pandemic, the retailer extracted all kinds of insight from social media conversations, including supply issues and problems with online shopping. These insights fed into all areas of the business. By being able to track customers' concerns in realtime, Walmart could meet their needs much more quickly.

How should you incorporate social media market research?

Social media is becoming an increasingly important source of insight for brands. Especially when it comes to understanding customer needs in real-time. This type of research won't replace more traditional methods. Rather, it will enhance existing research practices, helping to create a much bigger and more accurate picture of the market.

For more insights into how social media data can help shape your market research, sign up for our newsletter.

This interview was recorded via LinkedIn Live, if you prefer to view on LinkedIn, click the button below.

See related content

Don't miss tomorrow's social media industry news

Let Social Media Today's free newsletter keep you informed, straight from your inbox.

How to Use Social Media for Market Research

1. Track Trends with Social Media for Real-Time Insights

Most social media platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook, offer numerous ways to analyze trends and conduct market research. By simply searching the latest posts and popular terms, you can gain insight into emerging trends and see what customers are talking about in real-time. One example of this is conducting hashtag searches on Twitter. By setting up a few searches with hashtags related to your brand, industry or product, you can receive instant notifications when customers, clients or competitors use key terms.

2. Learn the Language of Your Audience for Improved Marketing Appeal

The words and factors that you use to track the success of your product or business might not always align with what customers find most important. By analyzing social media exchanges about your product or service, you can learn what factors customers use to determine value as well as the way that they speak about your product, service or brand. By utilizing these factors and terms within your own marketing, you can speak directly to consumers and improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. By creating customer-centric definitions of value, quality and other important terms, you can help to create a brand or product image that is unique amongst competitors and speaks directly to your target market.

3. Use the Real-Time Aspects of Social Media for Quick Research

Traditional market research methods, such as surveys or study groups, could take months to plan, form and execute. With social media, research can be conducted in a matter of minutes or hours. This makes it possible to use market research to follow increasingly specific aspects of your marketing efforts. From product launches to follow-up marketing, each part of your marketing plan can be analyzed independently for improved results across the entirety of your marketing plan. Instead of spending months developing a marketing research plan, and possibly only gaining outdated information as trends change, you can use social media for market research right now.

4. Use Social Media to Broaden the Scope of Your Market Research

Social media is increasing in popularity with both businesses and consumers across virtually every market demographic in existence. A 2011 report by Nielson on the state of social media claims that approximately 80-percent of people with Internet access utilize social media. This makes it possible to conduct market research with an audience that is many times larger than nearly any other marketing or media source can provide. The casual nature and easy access of social media also helps to promote user interaction, engagement and participation. This improves the chances of obtaining useful, accurate and honest data from your efforts.

5. Discover Unnoticed Trends and Insights by Engaging Instead of Leading

One of the biggest weaknesses to most marketing research methods is that they are driven by questions. To obtain the proper information, you must first know what to ask. At the same time, simply rewording a question can result in drastically different answers. This means that your market research is only as good as your questions. With the broad scope and interactive nature of social media, information is gained through interaction and observation. Instead of leading the discussions, you can simply observe or join in as an equal. This can result in a variety of answers and discoveries that might have remained hidden using other research methods.

6. Harness Social Media Research for Improved Cost Efficiency

In most cases, utilizing social media for market research is simply a matter of investing time. Free tools exist for nearly every social media platform to help gather information and use it to derive useful information. When compared to focus panels, discussion groups, studies and surveys, the cost difference is staggering. Through user engagement and discussion, your social media research also serves as advertising, brand building, network building, lead generation and offers numerous other improvements for your business or brand. When planned and implemented properly, few market research tools offer the cost efficiency and overall benefit of social media research.

From reduced costs and real-time access to information to the ability to uncover hidden trends and improve your marketing approach, social media offers powerful ways to optimize the market research efforts of any business. Best of all, social media research offers numerous ways to interact with your market and build your business. Conducting research is as simple as signing up for a social media service, such as LinkedIn or Twitter, and utilizing their built-in search features. Within minutes, your business can start analyzing trends, improving your marketing strategies and work towards achieving your desired results.

image: market research/shutterstock

Social Media Today news delivered to your inbox

Get the free daily newsletter read by industry experts

• Select user consent: By signing up to receive our newsletter, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy . You can unsubscribe at anytime.

Editors' picks

The Complete Elon Musk–Twitter Saga

For months, we’ve been tracking Elon Musk’s $44 billion deal with Twitter. Now that the deal is done, we watch as the Musk-Twitter era begins.

3 Steps for Establishing a Core Marketing Message

The key to maximizing a social media marketing strategy is to ground the approach in purpose.

Company Announcements

Want to share a company announcement with your peers?

Share your announcement ➔

• Meta Announces Next Steps for EU Messaging Interoperability By Andrew Hutchinson
• Bluesky and Threads Rise Following X’s Brazil Ban By Andrew Hutchinson
• TikTok Adds Instagram Notes-Like Feature to Inboxes By Andrew Hutchinson
• YouTube Implements Restrictions on Content Recommendations for Teens By Andrew Hutchinson

• Starting a Business
• Growing a Business
• Small Business Guide
• Business News
• Science & Technology
• Money & Finance
• For Subscribers
• Write for Entrepreneur
• Tips White Papers
• Entrepreneur Store
• United States
• Asia Pacific
• Middle East
• United Kingdom
• South Africa

Copyright © 2024 Entrepreneur Media, LLC All rights reserved. Entrepreneur® and its related marks are registered trademarks of Entrepreneur Media LLC

How to Use Social Media for Market Research Market research can be conducted via social media channels to gain insights into industry trends and competitor activity.

By Jessica Wong Edited by Micah Zimmerman Dec 8, 2022

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Social media has undoubtedly changed the way brands think about digital marketing. Just a few years ago, networks like Facebook , Instagram and LinkedIn only played a small part in global marketing strategies. But as their user numbers have grown, so has their importance for digital marketing . Today, social media channels offer digital marketers excellent market research opportunities.

How market research sets brands apart

Market research has always been an integral part of building a brand . Conducting market research means gathering information and learning more about your target market, establishing potential customer personas, and evaluating how successful your product could be.

Market research also helps quantify product-market fit. Once your product or service has been launched, research allows brand teams to check whether customers receive the messages they want to communicate.

With a company's marketing goals, market research forms the foundation of successful brand marketing strategies . In short, it is hard to overstate the importance of market research. Still, there are drawbacks. Traditional market research techniques, such as interviews and focus groups, can be time-consuming. These tools can also be tough on resources if the research is done thoroughly, forcing some brands to launch a marketing strategy built on hunches rather than data. Others limit the scope of their study in the hope that findings may still be valid. Both of these options are putting brands at risk.

Related: The 7 Secrets of Truly Successful Personal Brands

Social media lifts market research limitations

Social media platforms have all the tools necessary to provide brands with answers to market research questions. Social media can offer insights into branding , content messaging and creative design, as well as improve awareness of competitor activity and industry trends.

Much of this is made possible by the sheer number of potential customers brands can access via social media. Facebook alone has nearly three billion active users every month, which has been growing for nearly a decade. Instagram continues to gain ground, with currently around two billion active users.

Social media usage figures are projected to grow for at least the next few years. More than 4.26 billion people spent time on social media in 2021. Statisticians believe that figure will rise to nearly six billion within five years.

But social media can do more than provide user numbers. The companies behind Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok know a great amount of information about their users, starting with demographics and including lifestyle preferences . These insights enable brands to access the right audience faster than ever before and at lower costs.

Related: In a Crowded Field of Emerging Franchises, Only the Strongest Brands Thrive

How to use social media for market research

Social media channels allow brands to access several layers of information about their industry, the brand itself, competitors, messaging and creative design.

1. Industry insights

Using social media channels is an efficient way to assess industry trends in real-time. Channels like LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram make it easy to spot and isolate leading trends and changes in those trends. A few years ago, images captured consumer attention. More recently, however, video-based channels like TikTok have cemented the importance of video as a tool to connect with customers. Of course, brand teams can choose to ignore certain trends, but it is still important to understand the drivers behind the industry.

In this context, industry drivers are not only topics or tools. Social media has created a relatively new digital marketing phenomenon — working with influencers. Identifying and working with the right influencers can be a critical driver of business growth.

Before the advent of social media channels, gathering similar information required more time and in-depth analysis simply because the information was not as easily accessible.

2. Competitor research

Social media has made it easier to conduct competitor research . Companies from virtually every industry sector have started embracing social media channels to connect with customers and partners. As a result, it is far easier to understand your competitors' marketing strategies and analyze which marketing tactics and channels work best for them.

Following a competitor's social media channels helps brands understand what audiences engage with and which content they ignore. Brand teams gain a deeper insight into the mindset of their competitors' clients. Following these channels regularly allows you to clearly understand your competitors, their audiences, and their marketing approach.

Related: The Ultimate Guide to Competitive Research for Small Businesses

3. Brand positioning

Are your target audiences perceiving your brand the way you would like to be perceived? Monitoring social media allows your marketing team to answer this question quickly. Hashtags and search functions make it easy to assess how a brand is being discussed without any delay associated with traditional market research methods.

As a result of gaining instant insights, your team can adjust and correct its brand messaging quicker than ever.

4. Content messaging and design

A traditional approach to determining advertising messages might involve A/B testing , among other methods. While these types of market research are important for developing successful (traditional) advertising campaigns, they can be expensive and delay the campaign.

Social media channels allow brands to test their content messaging and design directly with minimal costs. Through likes and comments, brands gain instant customer feedback. Throughout a few posts, it will become clear whether customers are more likely to engage with images, videos or webinars, for example.

If a brand uses social media to generate sales, conversion figures will quickly deliver more tangible insights than A/B testing can. Those insights can immediately be applied to the advertising content, allowing brands to conduct market research and put their findings into practice simultaneously.

Using social media channels for market research lets brands learn about industry trends and competitor activity in real-time. Brand teams can also assess brand perception, messaging and content design without delay, optimizing market research results and overall campaign performance.

Entrepreneur Leadership Network® Contributor

Founder and CEO of Valux Digital and uPro Digital.

Want to be an Entrepreneur Leadership Network contributor? Apply now to join.

Editor's Pick Red Arrow

• She Imagined a Specific Type of Culture Before Starting Her Business — Then Grew It From 1 Cart to Cult Status: 'Magical Things Happening'
• Lock 'Finances Fuel Life Goals.' These Top Money Secrets Can Make You Happier and More Successful, According to an Expert.
• The Reddit Co-Founders Faced a Transformative Rejection in College — Here's How They Bounced Back to Start a $6.5 Billion Business
• Lock 5 Successful Podcasters Share the 'Golden Advice' That's Making Them Money in a Crowded Industry
• Jersey Mike's Has Opened Over 1,000 New Stores in the Past 5 Years and Is Planning 300 International Outposts – Find Out Where
• Lock All Entrepreneurs Think About Writing a Book — Here's How to Know If You're Ready for Your Own

Most Popular Red Arrow

This nfl team is owned by the fans — here's how much shares cost and what ownership gets you.

The Cheeseheads even own their hat maker.

5 Strategies That Helped Me Achieve 10x Returns on My Marketing Efforts

These five marketing tactics have delivered remarkable returns for my business.

AI for the Underdog — Here's How Small Businesses Can Thrive With Artificial Intelligence

How small businesses can harness the power of AI to streamline operations, enhance customer experiences and drive growth.

'Let It Go': A Couple Has Spent $400K Suing Disney After Being Banned From the Park's Exclusive 33 Club. Social Media Reactions Have Not Been G-Rated.

After getting banned from the exclusive members-only club for alleged bad behavior, a California couple has spent a fortune trying to get back to paling around with Mickey.

5 Ways CEOs Can Encourage Employees to Bring Their Whole Selves to Work

Creating a welcoming culture where employees can bring their "whole selves" to work is crucial to attracting and retaining top talent.

From Hire to Hero — 4 Strategies for Onboarding Senior Executives

Setting up high-level hires for success requires forethought, the right environment and a flexible runway.

Successfully copied link

Brandwatch has just been named The Best Social Media Monitoring Software by the Martech Breakthrough Awards 🏆

• · Brandwatch Academy
• Forrester Wave

Brandwatch Consumer Research

Formerly the Falcon suite

Formerly Paladin

Published September 6 th 2016

Conducting Social Media Research: How to Find Real Consumer Insights

Social is a rich source of data but only if you know how to conduct good social media research. This post explains the methods for finding consumer insights

Social media research can surface consumer insights that can be difficult and expensive to find in any other way. The volume of conversation on the web gives this research method a unique ability – uncovering qualitative insights on a quantitative scale.

For many people, however, it can be daunting. There is so much data: millions upon millions of conversations happen online every day. If you don’t know how to refine what you are listening to, you’ll drown in the data.

It’s also easy to rely on the metrics that are constantly produced on social: likes, followers, fans and so on. Knowing how to cut through the noise to find the information that can drive business decisions is a real skill. I recently spoke to Bex Carson, Head of Brandwatch’s Research Services team, to get an insight into best practice when it comes to social media research.

Developing an approach to social media research

Uncovering insights requires a certain approach. You need to move beyond the simple social metrics to uncover robust insights that can recommend a real business action. The problem can be knowing who to listen to, how to spot a trend, knowing what’s significant and putting your findings into context.

Many people will start with the metrics they know about. They then think about the questions it is possible to answer with those metrics, and develop a research plan based on that. A good social intelligence tool has the flexibility that renders this way of thinking very restrictive – it starts with what was already known and therefore limits the possibilities of what can be discovered.

Ask interesting questions

The foundation for good social media research is asking the right questions. If you start with a bad question, you’ll receive a bad answer.

Start by forgetting any concerns about how you are going to conduct the research. Focus on the problems and questions you need to answer, without thinking about the methodology. Once you have the question, you can work on the methodology.

With Brandwatch there’s a way to answer pretty much any question. The joy of social media is its flexibility and Brandwatch Analytics has been built to be flexible to match that.

Bex Carson, Head of Research Services, Brandwatch

The questions need to be specific. They need to be able to deliver an answer that can be acted upon. Examples of this sort of question might be “What do women in their 50s want from a fashion brand?” or “Is our content resonating with our target customers?”

Spend time developing questions, and brainstorm with others where possible. Consider the following:

• What do we want to be able to do that is different based on this research?
• What capacity/power/authority for change does the reader of the report have?
• How do I recognize success? What does good look like?
• What do I already know about this subject/audience?
• Is my question answerable within the timeframe available?

Do better analysis

There are two main approaches you can take to answering your questions. The first involves uncovering metrics that answer a defined question. The second is more of an exploratory approach, discovering insights as you work through the data. Where time and budget allows, a combination of the two approaches will generally reveal the most interesting and robust answers.

The best social media research that produces the best results will combine some elements of both. That way you know you are investing time to get definite answers to specific questions, but you’re leaving yourself open to discover something new about your audience.

BEX CARSON, BRANDWATCH

Structured and planned analysis.

For this type of research, you are looking for an answer to a specific question. You need to identify specific metrics that you can bring together to answer that question. By using the power of segmentation – Brandwatch’s Rules , Categories, and Tags – you can arrive at specific answers.

This method is great for answering defined, objective questions. For example, if you have run a campaign and want to know if it drove spontaneous awareness, you can look at the volume of discussion for both the campaign assets and the brand baseline over time. These relatively simple queries will result in metrics that uncover the success of your campaign.

Follow the breadcrumbs analysis

This approach is exploratory, listening to the data to discover the story within it. Think of it as  social media ethnography. You can arrive at a fuller understanding of your consumers, uncovering different audience groups as you move through the data and spot trends.

This methodology can be a challenge. You need to enter the project without preconceptions and ensure you don’t draw your own conclusions. It’s a harder way  to conduct social media research – using open listening to find underlying themes.

The benefits are plentiful, though. First, you are closer to the  voice of the customer . There is no substitute for listening to your customers verbatim, understanding the nuance and sentiment of their conversations.

As a human analyst, you can understand and categorize things that a machine simply can’t. Someone might be talking about the same topic even if they don’t use the same words. Reading through the conversations, you can find people might talk in a way that you hadn’t thought of, and use that to enrich your research.

1. Decide on your dataset

Broad topics and themes often drive more interesting results than brand queries. You want to analyze of a type of conversation rather than a particular brand.  Within the conversation theme, you still need to define the problem clearly so you can create a targeted query and reduce noise in the data.

As an example, let’s say you wanted to know what people who have seen the movie thought about the new Ghostbusters film . If you just wrote a query on Ghostbusters, there would be a lot of conversation around the all-female cast, or the abuse that Leslie Jones received on Twitter.

By writing a query that includes personal pronouns, mentions of cinema brands, people saying “just seen/watched” and so on, you will have a much cleaner data set without manipulating it too much.

2. Clean your data

This can be a really important way of revealing the interesting, more concealed consumer insights. Many topics can be dominated by a few obvious and popular themes, so that the insights get lost in comparison.

You want to surface underlying themes with a unique value, rather things you can see easily on a topic cloud/trend line. To do this, you can look at you initial query results to identify the popular themes, and then exclude those mentions by using tags.

The data that remains lets you see what else people are saying beyond what you already know. It can also be useful to remove retweets, leaving you with only the original conversations.

3. Take a random sample

While automation can be a useful tool, the type of analysis we are talking about here is human led. This means you need a manageable dataset. It needs to be large enough to be representative of the mentions, but small enough so it can be read completely, and in detail. Mark off the mentions as you work through them to ensure you cover your whole sample.

This allows you to undertake the next step…

4. Read and code using grouped categories

There is no right way to do this step, and it will largely depend on your dataset. This is where you go on a journey of discovery, hunting down the insights in the data. You want to start grouping themes and topics.

You can start by creating categories that you think you are going to find. To go back to the Ghostbusters example, you would expect some people to say they “loved it”, others that “hated it”, and everything in between.

It’s important to remember that this is just a starting point. You need to be completely data-led. New themes will emerge as you work through the data, so you need to add these.

Human analysis allows you to have nuanced emotional categories, such as anger, frustration, humor, joy and so on. A human analyst is able to pick these up where automated processes would not be able to.

You can also set up categories for author type, to understand the different conversations among different actors.

Brandwatch allows you to group categories together, so each emotional or author response can form a sub-group within a parent group. This can prove useful during your analysis.

Crucially, you want to liberally add categories as you read through the data. At the end, you might find there were only a couple of mentions of one category and decide to delete it. It’s better to do this than be conservative and realize you missed an important topic of discussion only once you reach the end of the dataset.

5. Analyze and chart

Now you need to dive into the charts and start analyzing.

The best way to start is to simply create a standard chart component and apply filters to the data. You can start looking at your different categories, moving the data around to spot interesting patterns.

Some of the most useful insights come from crossing your parent categories. So if you have author type on one axis, and emotion on the other, you can start to see different emotional responses from different author types.

Golden rules for social media research

1. compare everything and constantly seek out difference.

The fundamental tenet of social media research is noticing a difference between things. You don’t know what good looks like without seeing the bad, but you are looking for a significant difference. You don’t want to recommend sweeping changes because of a tiny difference in the data. Be curious and keep exploring.

If you want to be interesting, be interested.

2. Be curious and ask why

If you notice a difference, start digging into it. Then dig some more. Keep digging until you have read something that helps explain why that difference exists.

You can’t create a suggested action based on a piece of data if you don’t understand why that piece of data is the way that it is.

Presenting your social media research

First, remember that you are telling a story. With any story, you need to consider your audience.

There may be several people or departments that are going to read your report. They won’t all have the same amount of time available to read what you have written, and they might not all be interested in the same things.

While it’s a good idea to start with a methodology to give the report transparency, hit them with the key findings and consumer insights straight away.

Then, as you continue through the story of the data, you can explain each insight more thoroughly with charts, graphs, and analysis to back it up.

You might like

How to write a social media report.

We reveal how to write a social media report, whether you want to present in-depth research, a campaign-specific report, or a regular round-up of metrics.

Having insights buried in a 27 page PDF is frustrating and risks your hard work being overlooked.

Finally, remember that you’re not really telling your story; you’re telling the story of the people you’re listening to, so make sure to include the voice of the customer. Real examples of social posts, with real customer profile pictures, will bring your social media research to life.

Content Writer

Share this post

Brandwatch bulletin.

Offering up analysis and data on everything from the events of the day to the latest consumer trends. Subscribe to keep your finger on the world’s pulse.

New: Consumer Research

Harness the power of digital consumer intelligence.

Consumer Research gives you access to deep consumer insights from 100 million online sources and over 1.4 trillion posts.

More in marketing

Social media content plan: what you need to succeed.

By Brandwatch Aug 27

Social Media Monitoring: Essential Strategies for Online Success

14 social media holidays to celebrate this september.

By Yasmin Pierre Aug 13

10 Social Listening Tools and Who They’re Best for

By Brandwatch Jul 14

We value your privacy

We use cookies to improve your experience and give you personalized content. Do you agree to our cookie policy?

By using our site you agree to our use of cookies — I Agree

Falcon.io is now part of Brandwatch. You're in the right place!

Existing customer? Log in to access your existing Falcon products and data via the login menu on the top right of the page. New customer? You'll find the former Falcon products under 'Social Media Management' if you go to 'Our Suite' in the navigation.

Paladin is now Influence. You're in the right place!

Brandwatch acquired Paladin in March 2022. It's now called Influence, which is part of Brandwatch's Social Media Management solution. Want to access your Paladin account? Use the login menu at the top right corner.

US and International: +1-306-955-5512​  | UK and EU: 0121 512 0304

Community Support

Local Impact Awards

10 valuable insights (and tips) you’ll get from conducting social media market research

By Lawrence Dy | Jun 12, 2023 | Marketing | 12 min read

As a marketer that sells social media packages , conducting social media market research is an essential part of what you do. But did you know that conducting research on an ongoing basis instead of at the start of a campaign alone offers exceptional benefits? Ongoing research provides you with continual, up-to-date information about your clients’ target audiences to help you tweak campaigns and create new marketing initiatives.

Be successful with social media on behalf of your clients by downloading “The ultimate guide to effective social media for business” now.

In this post, we’re digging into the various insights you can get from conducting market research for social media campaigns, as well as tools and business social media ideas you can use to make sure your research is efficient and useful.

Table of Contents

• Consumer preferences and behaviors
• Demographics and psychographics of your target audience
• Brand perception
• Competitor analysis and comparison
• Effectiveness of marketing campaigns and messaging
• Industry trends
• Customer satisfaction and sentiment
• Identification of influencers and opinion leaders
• Insight into potential partnerships and collaborations
• Content ideas and themes for social media posts

Social listening and analytics tools

Keyword and hashtag research tools, access to your clients’ social media platforms, knowledge of your target audience and industry, research objectives, budget and resources to support the research process.

• Define clear research objectives
• Use varied research methods
• Focus on relevant social media platforms
• Monitor trends and patterns over time
• Engage with your audience
• Use social media listening tools
• Watch your competitors
• Utilize data visualization
• Continuously evaluate and adjust
• Use social media market research to inform your overall marketing strategy

What is social media market research?

What are some effective social media market research techniques, 10 valuable insights you can get from social media market research.

97 percent of online consumers access social media at least once per month and 37.9 percent of those people have made a purchase after engaging with advertisements or posts on social media ( Statista ). That’s why understanding how to get (and keep) the attention of those consumers is necessary if you want to launch successful social media marketing campaigns.

Market research can tell you more than just which companies you’re competing against in the industry. It can also help you gain a variety of valuable insights over time that help you better optimize your marketing campaigns .

1. Consumer preferences and behaviors

Social media market research is a powerful tool when it comes to taking a deep dive into the minds and hearts of consumers.

Think about it: social media is where people gather, connect, and express their preferences and personalities. It's a goldmine of information and if you can tap it, you can access the desires and behaviors of nearly any client’s target audience. By using tools to carefully analyze social media conversations and user-generated content, you’ll quickly have insight into what makes your audience tick. Analyze likes and dislikes to identify patterns and uncover emerging trends, determine brand perception and identify the next steps to an effective marketing campaign.

2. Demographics and psychographics of your target audience

While demographics give you details about your target audience such as age, gender, location, and income, psychographics take it a step further, delving into things like attitudes, values, interests, and lifestyle choices.

Understanding the demographics and psychographics of your target audience is like holding a treasure map to marketing success. It gives you the juicy bits like who your customers are, what makes them unique, and the best platforms and marketing tools you can use to connect with them. Use this information to create personas for your target audience and to craft tailored, meaningful messages in your marketing campaigns.

3. Brand perception

Reputation management on social media requires insight into how your client’s brand is perceived in the first place. Your social media market research can help you gather the knowledge you need to understand how consumers view the brand, as well as what steps you can take to improve or change their perception. Do consumers view the brand as witty, trustworthy, professional, or fun? Are its products and/or services seen as high-quality and luxurious or affordable? These perceptions will shape everything from attitudes about the brand to consumer purchasing decisions.

Brand perception is a qualitative metric that can be analyzed by reviewing social media conversations and mentions, online reviews, and user-generated content. Use the data you gather about brand perception to shape future marketing strategies.

4. Competitor analysis and comparison

If you’re looking for the ultimate marketing tool to add to your arsenal, competitor analysis is it. This data helps you better understand what you’re up against, as well as the landscape your brand is operating within, giving you a unique edge over others in your industry.

Competitor analysis and comparison is about studying several factors as they pertain to your competitors:

• Strategies: What social media platforms and marketing techniques are other businesses in your industry using to connect with audiences? Look beyond what they’re posting and analyze how they engage with their followers and other members of their community.
• Strengths: What are your competitors doing well? Do they have a visually appealing social media page, do they engage with their followers frequently? Take note of what they do well and more importantly, how you can do it better.
• Weaknesses: Your competitors’ weaknesses are your opportunity to shine. Find out what they could improve on and strategize ways to fill in those gaps on your own social media pages.

Comparison plays a pivotal role in this process so take time to benchmark your client’s brand against the competition. Keep in mind that it’s not about copying or imitating what their competitors are doing, but rather leveraging your own unique value propositions so that you can stand out against the crowd.

5. Effectiveness of marketing campaigns and messaging

Analyzing social media conversations, engagement metrics, and customer sentiment gives you the opportunity to better understand how impactful your marketing efforts actually are. They help you identify which social marketing campaigns and messaging strategies resonate with your audience vs. which don’t.

6. Industry trends

 Social media market research is a great way to gain a better understanding of what’s happening throughout your industry. It can help you identify emerging trends and customer preferences, as well as shifting market dynamics.

For example, a fashion brand can use market research on social media to monitor discussions among their target audience and watch for keywords, hashtags, or content that indicates upcoming trends. This helps the brand determine what products to import or design in the near future and how to shape their marketing strategy when those new products are released.

Other ways you can use social media to gather insights on industry trends include:

• Watching user-generated content: Keep an eye on videos, stories, and posts from users that are within the brand’s niche to see what’s trending.
• Monitoring influencers: Conduct some research to determine which influencers are most popular in your industry and keep an eye on what they’re talking about.
• Paying attention to sentiment and engagement: Watch what people are chatting about within the brand’s industry. Monitor engagement on certain topics, products, and hashtags that are relevant and keep an eye on how users are reacting to them.

7. Customer satisfaction and sentiment

Customer feedback provided in comments, reviews, and user-generated posts is a great way to gain a deeper understanding of how customers feel about a brand and to identify areas for improvement in your social media strategy.

There are several key ways that social media market research helps you measure and understand customer satisfaction and sentiment:

• Tracking mentions: Watch mentions of the brand to find comments, feedback, reviews, and other forms of feedback on social media platforms.
• Monitoring complaints: Identify patterns in customer complaints and negative feedback to address issues and reevaluate your strategies.
• Guiding interactions: Use social media market research to direct the way you interact with followers, basing your strategy on their sentiment, as well as your clients’ guidelines for social media management .

8. Identification of influencers and opinion leaders

The right influencers and opinion leaders can quickly help you attract the attention of your target audience. Social media market research can help you identify which social media personalities have the most influence with consumers, as well as whether they have the right voice and personality you’re looking for.

Influencers are a quick (and often affordable) way to amplify brand messages through trusted and respected voices. When influencers endorse or promote a brand’s products and services, it typically has a profound impact on their followers’ purchasing decisions and brand perception.In fact, it’s worth noting that an estimated 50% of Millennials trust product recommendations from social media influencers, while 92% of markets strongly believe that influencer marketing is effective ( HubSpot ).

9. Insight into potential partnerships and collaborations

Collaborating on products, services, or promotions with other brands can be a great way to garner attention from a whole new audience that’s within your target market.

Utilize social media market research to identify brands that have similar values and identities and reach to discuss the potential for partnerships or cross-branding. Some good examples of brands that have done this in the past include Pottery Barn and Sherwin Williams, Yeezy and Adidas, and Taco Bell and Doritos.

10. Content ideas and themes for social media posts

When you’re low on inspiration, market research on social media can help you quickly get the ideas you need to create effective social media posts that convert. Look through the pages of competitors, influencers, and similar-sized businesses to inspire your own posts. That said, always make sure you’re creating your own content and posts without plagiarizing others.

Things you’ll need to conduct social media market research

To effectively conduct market research on social media, you’ll need several tools at your disposal.

Social listening and analytics tools take the guesswork out of market research and help you monitor the web for mentions of a particular brand, industry, product, service, or keyword. Analytics tools provide you with important metrics about your social media pages such as engagement and follower counts, as well as comparisons over time to help you understand where and when you’ve been most successful.

Keywords and hashtags are essential parts of any social media campaign. They help you ensure the right audience can find your content, and they help algorithms on Google, Instagram, and other platforms properly index your content.

Finding the right keywords and hashtags to use on your social media posts can seem like a challenge; however, using keyword and hashtag research tools can help you better understand which ones have better search volumes, the intent behind those searches, and the potential cost-per-click should you choose to promote your posts.

To properly conduct social media market research on behalf of clients, you’ll need full access to all of their social media pages. This enables you to effectively review analytics and monitor for mentions.

Without a comprehensive understanding of who you’re marketing a brand to and what you’re marketing, it’s difficult to design effective social media campaigns.

Before undertaking social media projects on behalf of your clients, take time to get to know them, their businesses, their industries, and the type of person they usually sell to.

Start your market research with a purpose. Write down the questions you have about your client and its competitors before you get started to guide you in your research.

Questions you might ask include:

• How does the average social media user perceive this brand?
• Which businesses are at the top of this industry?
• Who are the top social media influencers in this industry?
• How well do competitors engage with their followers?
• What type of posts draw the most engagement?

Social media market research can be time consuming. Make sure your client understands the process and is aware of the amount of time budgeted for the research portion of their social media project. Furthermore, if your agency is able to, assign a person or team to handle market research exclusively.

Best practices to conduct social media market research

You don’t have to go into your social media market research project blind. Armed with the tools listed above and this set of best practices, you’ll be able to quickly navigate the social media landscape to gather the insights you need.

1. Define clear research objectives

Make sure you understand what you’re looking for before you dive in. There are plenty of reasons to conduct social media research so determine if you’re looking to gain edge over the competition, scope out influencers or brands to collaborate with, or gather some intel on customer sentiment and brand perspective.

Before you get started, write out questions you want answered in your research and create plan to help yourself find exactly what you need.

2. Use varied research methods

Don’t rely on metrics alone to conduct your research. Combine the quantitative info you gather from analytics tools with qualitative research such as brand mentions and sentiment.

3. Focus on relevant social media platforms

There are plenty of social media platforms out there and if you plan to conduct social media market research on all of them, you’re probably getting a little too ambitious. Focus on the mainstream social media platforms that people actually use. That includes Google Business Profile, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

4. Monitor trends and patterns over time

Things change over time and that include social media trends. Conducting research once isn’t going to give you the entire picture. Log into your clients’ social media platforms on a regular basis to conduct research and stay on top of changes in trends and patterns.

5. Engage with your audience

Don’t just eavesdrop on the conversations your audience is having online, engage with followers and consumers on other profiles to find out how they feel about the brand. This is a better way to gather organic reviews and insight from people who have direct experience with your client.

6. Use social media listening tools

Social media listening tools are the best and easiest way to track mentions online and the sentiment behind them.

7. Watch your competitors

Don’t just focus on your clients’ social media pages—watch their competitors closely, too. Track their mentions, watch their engagement, and use the intel you gather as a benchmark for your clients’ social media pages.

8. Utilize data visualization

When you’re communicating metrics to your client, use graphs, charts, and other visual data to more effectively display their social media success.

9. Continuously evaluate and adjust

Don’t be afraid to go back to the drawing board when something isn’t working. Social media is an ever-changing being and that requires brands to adapt quickly to changing trends. When you create your social media strategies, do it with these insights at the forefront of your mind.

10. Use social media market research to inform your overall marketing strategy

The research you conduct should be at the heart of your social media and marketing strategy. As you learn more about your clients’ audience and competition, adjust your strategies accordingly to stay on top of emerging trends and changes in your clients’ industries and the general social media landscape.

Frequently asked questions

Social media market research is the process of gathering information about a brand, it’s audience, and its competitors. It’s done by exploring social media platforms and analyzing various qualitative and quantitative metrics, including engagement and customer sentiment.

Social listening and analytics are the easiest and most effective ways to gather information about how a brand is performing on social media platforms and how the audience perceives it.

About the Author

Lawrence Dy

Lawrence Dy is the SEO Strategy Manager at Vendasta. His career spans from starting as a Jr. Copywriter in the automotive industry to becoming a Senior Editorial Content Manager in various digital marketing niches. Outside of work, Lawrence moonlights as a music producer/beatmaker and spends time with friends and family.

Turn your digital agency into a scalable power house with Vendasta

Don't forget to share!

Discover more articles

The Prospecting Playbook: 12 Methods for Agency Client Acquisition

How to boost engagement and revenue with ai email marketing, your complete guide to dominate local seo with the google 3-pack, categories that may interest you, subscribe to the newsletter.

Get the latest news and insights from our blog, Conquer Local, and podcasts delivered straight to your inbox.

• Print Friendly

Instant insights, infinite possibilities

Social media market research: Navigating opportunities and challenges

Last updated

3 April 2024

Certainly, traditional forms of market research, such as surveys and focus groups, will continue to have a role. However, these can be backward-looking, and narrow in focus.

Social media listening and monitoring can provide a deeper understanding of in-the-moment trends and behaviors by analyzing a vast array of discussions on social media platforms. This approach can help businesses comprehensively understand their audience and make more informed decisions.

This article looks at the opportunities and challenges of social media for market research.

Market analysis template

Save time, highlight crucial insights, and drive strategic decision-making

• Unparalleled access to understanding today’s global consumer

It’s strange to think that social media has only existed since the start of the millennia. Now, billions of users worldwide share their thoughts, preferences, and experiences on social media platforms. According to Statista, there are 4.95 billion social media users worldwide, or just under 60% of the global population. 

While not everyone will post every day of the week, such a large population can’t help but generate massive amounts of data. Scraping social media data allows researchers to gain access to this unrivaled trove of information. It's like having a front-row seat to the global conversation regarding products, brands, and trends. (“Data scraping” is simply a technique whereby a computer extracts data from another program or platform).

• Real-time analysis for swift decision-making

Traditional market research can take significant time to yield results. Timelines are generally measured in weeks, if not months. Here’s where social media data and sentiment analysis come into play. This technique allows businesses to analyze what consumers think, feel, or do in real-time. 

Companies can swiftly make more agile decisions and adapt to an evolving market landscape rather than lagging behind what consumers want and expect or designing products for yesterday rather than today. 

Oreo demonstrated the power of real-time social media analytics and marketing by capitalizing on a blackout during the 2013 Super Bowl. Following the outage and social media commentary, Oreo’s brand team captured the online sentiment by quickly crafting and tweeting an ad saying, "Power out? No problem. You can still dunk in the dark." 

Source: Oreo Cookie, X

By leveraging social media trends, Oreo demonstrated its agility and creativity. The real-time response showcased the power of data capture linked directly to the brand and marketing teams.

Free AI content analysis generator

Make sense of your research by automatically summarizing key takeaways through our free content analysis tool.

• Identifying trends and staying ahead of the curve

How did you find out about the Barbie movie? What about Oppenheimer? What about Barbenhiemer ?

Film execs could have relied on surveys or focus groups to gauge consumer sentiment about their films. However, analyzing pre-release organic social media data is more effective for understanding audience excitement and anticipation. This approach would have revealed that Barbie, in particular, would be a knockout success. 

Source: Far Out Magazine

Analysis of social media data like this allows businesses to identify emerging trends and capitalize on them before they reach their peak. 

For example, by gauging the levels of evident excitement about the movie’s release, film studios could argue for wider distribution or make plans around merchandising related to the film. 

By staying ahead of the curve, companies can position themselves as trendsetters rather than followers, gaining a competitive edge in the market.

• Understanding your consumer better and optimizing your product

Ever wished you could read your customers' minds?

Well, sentiment analysis comes pretty close.

By deciphering the emotions behind customer reviews and social media posts, businesses can understand what their audience loves or dislikes about their products. 

For example, the beloved ice cream brand Ben and Jerry’s used social media data analysis several years ago to optimize their iconic Cherry Garcia flavor. Customers were venting online about a lack of cherries. Digging deeper using sentiment analysis, they pinpointed the issue to the amount of cherries depicted on the label. 

Once they redesigned the label to show fewer cherries, the complaints decreased (presumably because expectations and reality now matched).

After considering all the feedback, Ben & Jerry's also revamped the recipe with

Reduced sugar content

Sweeter cherry variety

Bigger chocolate chunks

This product facelift yielded remarkable results: Sales grew, and positive social media sentiment followed the relaunch. 

More generally, social media feedback for any brand serves as a compass for product improvement, ensuring that companies meet customer expectations and boost brand loyalty.

• More targeted marketing and personalization

In the era of information overload, personalized marketing is the key to capturing consumers' attention. Leveraging social media data allows businesses to understand their target audience intimately. Armed with this knowledge, companies can create hyper-targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with specific demographics, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion. 

Brands like Amazon, Sephora, and Nike leverage social media data and other data and analytics streams to create unique, personalized customer experiences for their audiences, build closer relationships with them, and support loyalty. 

• Social media scraping is a powerful tool, but it comes with several issues and challenges

While providing valuable insights, scraping social media data can raise questions and challenges around user privacy. There is a fine line between extracting information for market research and violating individuals' privacy rights.

• Ensuring user privacy when accessing, aggregating, and sharing user social media data is crucial

Ethically and responsibly conducting the gathering and use of social media user data is vital.

Early in the history of the internet, America Online (AOL) showed how not to gather and share consumer data. In 2006, AOL released search query data for over 650,000 users . The released dataset, intended for research purposes, contained sensitive and personally identifiable information. 

Due to the common practice of individuals searching for their names (along with those of friends and family), many people, while technically anonymous, were easily identifiable. Coupled with explicit searches or queries related to illegal activities, this had the potential for significant embarrassment and even evidence of criminal intent for the users involved. 

In 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had harvested the personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent. They used this data to create psychological profiles for targeted political advertising during the 2016 United States presidential election.

The incident sparked widespread concern about user privacy, data protection, and the influence of social media on democratic processes. It led to increased scrutiny of tech companies and calls for greater regulation of data privacy and digital advertising practices. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter started severely limiting access to customer data from their platforms, leading to what is commonly called the ‘ APIcalypse .’

Given these events, businesses and brands must collect and use user or consumer data ethically, considering data providers' privacy rights. It is essential to avoid publicly collecting and republishing data that could identify individuals, as doing so could result in legal repercussions for those who collect and use such data.

• Considerations around accuracy and bias

Like any data source, there is the potential for inaccuracy and biases, which can skew the results of scraping social media data. For example, not everyone on social media expresses their true feelings, and specific demographics may be overrepresented. 

In 2021, data from the Pew Research Center revealed a notable generation gap in social media usage. Specifically, less than 50% of Americans aged 65 and up engage with social media, contrasting sharply with the over 80% of users under 50.

Moreover, the distribution of users varies by platform, with Snapchat and Instagram predominantly drawing in younger audiences, while Facebook boasts the highest percentage of older users.

There is also something known as participation bias, whereby, on social media, individuals don’t contribute and discuss all topics equally. Instead, they engage and generate content on a limited range of issues important to them. 

While not limited to social media market research (in survey research, respondents tend to complete surveys on topics that interest them), this type of bias can skew the data, making it less representative of populations as a whole. Therefore, researchers must be aware of these limitations and implement strategies to mitigate bias , ensuring the accuracy of their findings.

• Coping with the sheer amount of data

There is a vast amount of data available, with over 4 billion people active on social media globally. 

So, there’s a real risk of drowning in irrelevant data, hindering your ability to make informed decisions. Trying to sort through this tsunami to extract meaningful insights requires increasingly sophisticated filtration tools and algorithms. 

Several analytics platforms provide solutions, including Sprout Social , HubSpot, and Meltwater , which distill the vast amount of data available into something manageable.

• You can NOT be serious: navigating sarcasm and irony in social media analytics

Anyone who has spent five minutes on a platform like Reddit or X knows that social media is a breeding ground for sarcasm, irony, and nuanced idioms.

While analytics and algorithms are improving daily, sentiment analysis tools struggle to accurately interpret these subtleties, leading to misunderstandings and potentially misrepresenting consumers’ true feelings about various situations and things.

For example, in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, the food website Epicurious erroneously attempted to share sympathy for the victims via Twitter .

Unfortunately, the sentiment analysis algorithm they used utterly failed to discern the gravity of the situation. Their automated tweets included promotional messages and links to breakfast recipes—highly insensitive given the scope of the tragedy.

Source: Fast Company

Epicurious quickly pulled the tone-deaf tweets and spent the next 48 hours apologizing. While that’s just one example, their blunder is an important reminder not to over-rely on computer-driven sentiment analysis. Ideally, there is still a human checking such predictive suggestions. 

• Adapting to evolving social media platforms

Just like any other area of tech (perhaps even more so), brands will need to adjust to the evolving landscape of social media platforms. 

New platforms emerge (and decline), algorithms change, and user behaviors evolve. For example, TikTok has only been around since 2016 but has transformed the social media landscape. The platform boasts impressive statistics, including 3 billion downloads (a notable 672 million downloads in 2022 alone) and a staggering 50 million daily active users. It even has its own dedicated trends research reports center , which captures and shares some of the behavior and trends it picks up across its diverse user base.

To remain competitive, businesses and brands must consistently update their data collection and analysis methods and monitor consumer trends and behaviors.

• Navigating the future of market research with social media

It's clear that research using social media market research holds great potential. However, businesses must responsibly leverage social media data, addressing ethical concerns, mitigating biases, and continually refining analytical tools. 

Social media data and sentiment analysis aren't just tools; they provide valuable guidance for businesses navigating the ever-changing landscape of consumer preferences. 

By comprehending the opportunities and challenges associated with these tools, companies can chart a course toward more informed decision-making, improved products, and stronger connections with their audience.

Should you be using a customer insights hub?

Do you want to discover previous research faster?

Do you share your research findings with others?

Do you analyze research data?

Start for free today, add your research, and get to key insights faster

Editor’s picks

Last updated: 3 April 2024

Last updated: 30 April 2024

Last updated: 13 May 2024

Last updated: 22 July 2023

Last updated: 26 July 2024

Last updated: 22 August 2024

Last updated: 10 August 2024

Latest articles

Related topics, .css-je19u9{-webkit-align-items:flex-end;-webkit-box-align:flex-end;-ms-flex-align:flex-end;align-items:flex-end;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:row;-ms-flex-direction:row;flex-direction:row;-webkit-box-flex-wrap:wrap;-webkit-flex-wrap:wrap;-ms-flex-wrap:wrap;flex-wrap:wrap;-webkit-box-pack:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;justify-content:center;row-gap:0;text-align:center;max-width:671px;}@media (max-width: 1079px){.css-je19u9{max-width:400px;}.css-je19u9>span{white-space:pre;}}@media (max-width: 799px){.css-je19u9{max-width:400px;}.css-je19u9>span{white-space:pre;}} decide what to .css-1kiodld{max-height:56px;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}@media (max-width: 1079px){.css-1kiodld{display:none;}} build next, decide what to build next, log in or sign up.

Get started for free

Send us an email

Worksheet: How to Conduct Social Media Market Research in 90 Minutes or Less

Market research initiatives can make a major impact on a brand. Unfortunately, it’s rare for marketers to have the time and budget needed to invest in regular focus groups, surveys and interviews. 

That’s where social data comes in. Eighty-five percent of business executives say social data will be a primary source of business intelligence going forward. With social listening and analytics tools, brands can tap into readily available conversations to extract unbiased feedback quickly and efficiently. 

Use this worksheet to gather business-critical insights in less than two hours. This process will help you:

• Narrow in on the questions and feedback you need to develop an all-star social strategy
• Refresh your understanding of your brand’s competitive landscape 
• Gather unfiltered consumer insights with organization wide applications 

Download this worksheet to streamline your social media market research practices and make more data-driven decisions today.

View Template

Recommended for you.

• Social Listening
• Social Media Strategy

Social media sentiment analysis: Benefits and guide for 2024

• Social Media Analytics

9 key social media listening metrics every marketer needs to know in 2024

Social media monitoring vs. social media listening

How to use social listening tools to build a stronger business

• Now on slide

Build and grow stronger relationships on social

Sprout Social helps you understand and reach your audience, engage your community and measure performance with the only all-in-one social media management platform built for connection.

• Voxco Online
• Voxco Panel Management
• Voxco Panel Portal
• Voxco Audience
• Voxco Mobile Offline
• Voxco Dialer Cloud
• Voxco Dialer On-premise
• Voxco TCPA Connect
• Voxco Analytics
• Voxco Text & Sentiment Analysis

• 40+ question types
• Drag-and-drop interface
• Skip logic and branching
• Multi-lingual survey
• Text piping
• Question library
• CSS customization
• White-label surveys
• Customizable ‘Thank You’ page
• Customizable survey theme
• Reminder send-outs
• Survey rewards
• Social media
• Website surveys
• Correlation analysis
• Cross-tabulation analysis
• Trend analysis
• Real-time dashboard
• Customizable report
• Email address validation
• Recaptcha validation
• SSL security

Take a peek at our powerful survey features to design surveys that scale discoveries.

Download feature sheet.

• Hospitality
• Academic Research
• Customer Experience
• Employee Experience
• Product Experience
• Market Research
• Social Research
• Data Analysis

Explore Voxco 

Need to map Voxco’s features & offerings? We can help!

Watch a Demo 

Download Brochures 

Get a Quote

• NPS Calculator
• CES Calculator
• A/B Testing Calculator
• Margin of Error Calculator
• Sample Size Calculator
• CX Strategy & Management Hub
• Market Research Hub
• Patient Experience Hub
• Employee Experience Hub
• NPS Knowledge Hub
• Market Research Guide
• Customer Experience Guide
• Survey Research Guides
• Survey Template Library
• Webinars and Events
• Feature Sheets
• Try a sample survey
• Professional Services

Get exclusive insights into research trends and best practices from top experts! Access Voxco’s ‘State of Research Report 2024 edition’ .

We’ve been avid users of the Voxco platform now for over 20 years. It gives us the flexibility to routinely enhance our survey toolkit and provides our clients with a more robust dataset and story to tell their clients.

VP Innovation & Strategic Partnerships, The Logit Group

• Client Stories
• Voxco Reviews
• Why Voxco Research?
• Careers at Voxco
• Vulnerabilities and Ethical Hacking

Explore Regional Offices

• Survey Software The world’s leading omnichannel survey software
• Online Survey Tools Create sophisticated surveys with ease.
• Mobile Offline Conduct efficient field surveys.
• Text Analysis
• Close The Loop
• Automated Translations
• NPS Dashboard
• CATI Manage high volume phone surveys efficiently
• Cloud/On-premise Dialer TCPA compliant Cloud on-premise dialer
• IVR Survey Software Boost productivity with automated call workflows.
• Analytics Analyze survey data with visual dashboards
• Panel Manager Nurture a loyal community of respondents.
• Survey Portal Best-in-class user friendly survey portal.
• Voxco Audience Conduct targeted sample research in hours.
• Predictive Analytics
• Customer 360
• Customer Loyalty
• Fraud & Risk Management
• AI/ML Enablement Services
• Credit Underwriting

Find the best survey software for you! (Along with a checklist to compare platforms)

Get Buyer’s Guide

• 100+ question types
• SMS surveys
• Financial Services
• Banking & Financial Services
• Retail Solution
• Risk Management
• Customer Lifecycle Solutions
• Net Promoter Score
• Customer Behaviour Analytics
• Customer Segmentation
• Data Unification

Explore Voxco 

Watch a Demo 

Download Brochures 

• CX Strategy & Management Hub
• The Voxco Guide to Customer Experience
• Professional services
• Blogs & White papers
• Case Studies

Find the best customer experience platform

Uncover customer pain points, analyze feedback and run successful CX programs with the best CX platform for your team.

Get the Guide Now

VP Innovation & Strategic Partnerships, The Logit Group

• Why Voxco Intelligence?
• Our clients
• Client stories
• Featuresheets

Harnessing Social Media for Market Research Mastery

SHARE THE ARTICLE ON

Introduction

Most companies are aware of how invaluable market research is to remain competitive and build a stronger brand. However, conducting market research can often be an expensive and time-consuming affair. With the evolution of technology and the introduction of social media platforms, companies can now leverage more efficient and cost-effective methods for market research. Social media can give brands insight into their brand image, customer preferences, target market, and other important facets of market research. 

In this article, we will explore how brands can use social media as a tool to conduct market research and learn more about their customers and target audience.

Ways in Which Brands Can Leverage Social Media for Market Research

Let’s look at three effective ways in which brands can leverage social media as a tool to conduct market research:

Using Analytics for Qualitative Content

Brands can use social media analytics to assess their engagement, likes, comments, and shares on their social media pages. By assessing these different metrics, brands can develop an understanding of the kind of content and products that are receiving the most positive feedback from their target market. 

Additionally, brands can also use these metrics to perform competitor analysis by comparing their own social media pages with their competitors’. If a brand realises that their competitors are receiving more likes, follows, and overall engagement, then they can try to employ similar strategies to grow their own page to increase the awareness of their brand and its products/services.   

For example, if a brand posts a picture on Instagram and then notices that this picture is being shared more than their average post, then they will get an idea of the kind of content they need to create to increase the reach of their account. 

Using Social Listening

Social listening refers to the monitoring of the conversations and feedback about your company, brand, product, and/or services by obtaining insights from different social media channels. It allows brands to understand what their customers are talking about, what they feel, and what they need from their company. Brands can gather and analyse such customer data and leverage it to improve marketing, operational, and business metrics. Social listening can even be leveraged to analyse what people are saying about your competitors. 

For example, a brand can use Twitter to go through ‘tweets’ that have their brand or product name in it as a hashtag. This will allow them to assess the different conversations taking place about their brand to get an understanding of the positives and negatives associated with their brand. 

Conducting Polls or Questionnaires

Brands can use social media to conduct polls or questionnaires to help them understand consumer preferences and opinions better. A lot of popular social media platforms, such as Twitter and Instagram, have an inbuilt feature that allows their users to conduct polls. 

For instance, Instagram provides its users with a tool that allows them to conduct polls on their ‘Instagram Stories’. These stories are generally viewed and responded to by the user’s following. The user can view the results of their poll, as well as the lists of which users voted for either option. 

Advantages of Using Social Media for Market Research

Let’s take a look at a few key advantages of leveraging social media for market research purposes:

• Access to Real-Time Insights : Social media allows brands to obtain real-time insights into opinions, trends, popular terms, etc. Brands can leverage this information to identify emerging trends and cater to the new needs of customers. 
• Efficient : Traditional market research methods generally take weeks or months to plan and execute. However, by leveraging social media to conduct market research, brands can conduct market research within a matter of minutes, hours, or days. 
• Cost-Effective : Almost all social media platforms give users access to social media tools that allow them to gather useful insights. Information on demographic distribution, likes, shares, engagement, comments, etc, can all help a business understand its target market better. 
• Broadens the Scope of Market Research : Almost everyone today uses social media platforms. Therefore, when conducting market research using insights from social media channels, you have access to a much larger audience than you would’ve had with traditional market research techniques.

FAQs on Social Media as a tool for Market Research

 Social listening refers to the process of monitoring and assessing the different conversations taking place in regard to your brand, company, and its products, using insights from social media channels.

Brands can carry out market research using social media in the following ways:

• Using social listening to track what is being said about their company, brand, and products.
• Using the tools available on social media platforms to conduct polls and/or surveys.
• Using social media analytics to measure likes, comments, shares, and engagement.

 Brand sentiment can be defined as the emotion or opinion expressed in a mention of your brand. It can illustrate positive, negative, or neutral emotions toward your brand and/or its products. It gives organizations insights into what customers think of their brand and can help them track brand health.

 A few advantages of using social media for market research purposes are: 

• It is cost-effective.
• It is much quicker than traditional methods of market research.
• It provides access to, and therefore insights from, an extremely large audience.

Explore Voxco Survey Software

+ Omnichannel Survey Software 

+ Online Survey Software 

+ CATI Survey Software 

+ IVR Survey Software 

+ Market Research Tool

+ Customer Experience Tool 

+ Product Experience Software 

+ Enterprise Survey Software 

We use cookies in our website to give you the best browsing experience and to tailor advertising. By continuing to use our website, you give us consent to the use of cookies. Read More

• Do Not Sell My Personal Info

•  ⋅ 
• Social Media

20 Awesome Examples Of Social Media Marketing

Successful social media campaigns have one thing in common: They provide value to their audience. Here are 20 examples to inspire you.

Technology makes the world seem a lot smaller.

Keeping up with friends and family on the other side of the country or across the globe no longer requires an expensive telephone call or slow, one-way snail mail.

Instead, thanks to the power of social media , we can bridge distances in the blink of an eye. In just seconds, you can share updates about your life or check in with anyone with internet access.

Social media has changed how we communicate and how we consume information and entertainment.

These platforms unlock a treasure trove of opportunities for savvy marketers, transforming how brands engage with their audience and share their stories on a global stage.

Why Is Social Media Marketing Important For Brands?

Social media platforms like Instagram , TikTok , X (Twitter), and Facebook – among others – present businesses with an opportunity to engage with a massive audience.

They are not just digital spaces for socializing; they are vibrant marketplaces.

As of 2024, the global social media user base had soared to over 4.8 billion people, representing an ever-expanding audience for brands – and a whole lot of potential customers.

Social media provides the opportunity for marketers to humanize their brand through compelling storytelling that showcases their identity and values.

With social media marketing, brands can weave their narratives, engage vast audiences without hefty budgets, and raise awareness and consideration for their company with a broader audience.

It’s also a powerful tool for building authentic relationships with your target consumer .

You can conduct real-time customer service, gather feedback (both positive and negative), and build brand trust over time by interacting and engaging with your social community across specific platforms.

In addition:

• 68% of consumers follow brands on social media to stay updated about products and services.
• The average time spent on social media daily is 2 hours and 24 minutes.

The landscape of social media marketing is also shifting towards more engaging content formats such as short videos, live streams, and interactive stories.

From viral organic posts to paid display ads that allow you to target a highly specific demographic, social media presents an unrivaled opportunity to boost your brand visibility and find new customers.

That said, these platforms are not just about placing ads in front of consumers; they’re about creating conversations, building communities, and driving genuine brand engagement through content that resonates with audiences.

So, what separates the companies who are killing it on social media from the thousands of others who never quite seem to gain any traction?

In this piece, we’ll look at some outstanding ways brands have leveraged popular social platforms to inspire your campaigns.

How To Measure Social Media Marketing Effectiveness

Before we dive into the fun stuff, let’s take a moment to discuss how you can gauge the impact of your social media marketing efforts.

The key to assessing the effectiveness of your social media activities lies in measuring your key performance indicators (KPIs).

Some KPIs you might want to consider tracking include:

• Reach: The number of unique users who see your content. This helps you understand the overall scale of content distribution.
• Impressions: How many times your content was viewed (regardless of clicks or engagements). This can help you gauge how frequently people are looking at your content.
• Engagements: Interactions with your content (e.g., how many likes, shares, comments, saves, etc., it received). This helps you understand how engaging users are finding your content.
• Conversions: How effective your content is at driving actions (e.g., link clicks, follows, form fills, sales, sign-ups, etc.) This helps you understand whether your content is driving towards your goal-related activity.

The KPIs you choose should closely align with your strategic goals.

If you’re looking to boost awareness, reach, impressions, and engagement, offer valuable insights into how widely your message is seen and whether it’s resonating with users.

If you’re focused on lead generation or direct sales, focusing on conversion rates will provide a clearer measure of success.

Each brand is different, which means they will not only measure success differently but will also vary in which platforms are most effective for their social media marketing efforts.

With this in mind, we’ve broken down our examples and inspiration by platform. So, with no further ado, let’s jump in.

1. Dove: Project #ShowUs

Campaign Outline:

To highlight that beauty comes in many forms, Dove launched Project #ShowUs, a campaign intended to challenge stereotypes of what is and isn’t considered beautiful.

In collaboration with Getty Images and Girlgaze Photographers, Project #ShowUs created the largest stock photo library in the world created by women – featuring all female-identifying and non-binary individuals.

The library featured over 5,000 photographs of women from around the globe. Dove took to social media to introduce it to the world, creating video content for YouTube and partnering with influencers to gain traction.

The Numbers:

• The YouTube video has generated over 33.5 million views.
• More than 100,000 women pledged to create a more inclusive vision of beauty.
• 900+ companies in 40 countries downloaded 7,500+ images from the collection
• The hashtag #ShowUs saw thousands of engagements across YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.

Why Did It Work?

For generations, media and advertising have presented an image of what beauty is. However, this has left so many women feeling like they are not represented by media and advertising.

Dove spoke directly to the feelings of its target audience, engaging with them about the brand’s value and encouraging them to take pride in being themselves.

Strategic delivery helped reach women worldwide.

2. BuzzFeed x Friskies: Dear Kitten

If there’s one thing the internet loves, it’s cat videos.

Buzzfeed and Friskies tapped into this sentiment with their “Dear Kitten” videos, in which an older house cat teaches a kitten how to be a cat.

• The launch video has been viewed on YouTube more than 34 million times.
• Twelve follow-up videos have been viewed millions of times each.
• The campaign led to viral TikTok parodies, with the hashtag #DearKitten receiving more than 3.6 million views.

You don’t have to have genius-level insight into the human psyche to understand why this campaign was so successful.

It has cute cats and a funny script.

3. Apple: “Study With Me”

Apple tried its hand at the popular “Study With Me” video trend in 2023 by creating a 90-minute feature starring actress and college junior Storm Reid.

In the video, Reid uses the Pomodoro Technique – which focuses on 25-minute study sessions followed by 5-minute breaks – to showcase a productive study routine.

The video serves as a virtual study companion for viewers who are looking for that type of content while also highlighting the capabilities of Apple’s MacBook Air product.

• The video has generated over 18 million views on YouTube.

Why Did It Work:

Apple did what great social media marketing often does: It tapped into a trending format to reach its ideal audience.

By tapping into a burgeoning trend among students seeking virtual companionship and motivation – and pairing that with Storm Reid, a recognizable figure who is also relatable for the target audience – the campaign struck a chord of being both authentic and helpful to viewers.

On top of that, incorporating a tried-and-true study technique gave the audience a practical takeaway to enhance their own study habits.

4. eBay: Modathon

eBay wanted to shift perceptions of its brand and drive excitement with an audience of auto enthusiasts.

So, the brand created a social media campaign to tap into the subculture of offroading by leveraging the huge inventory of eBay Motors.

In a YouTube series called “ Modathon ,” the company partnered with YouTube creators on a mission to transform a 1979 Bronco into an offroading powerhouse using only parts and accessories from eBay Motors.

Across several longform episodes, creators customized the Bronco with parts for challenging trails.

The series generated:

• 35,000 new YouTube channel subscribers.
• Over 8.4 million views on YouTube to date.
• More than 100 million minutes watched.
• 6:28 minute average episode watch time.

The Modathon challenge succeeded by tapping into what drives the offroading community: a passion for adventure, customization, and modification.

By partnering with YouTube creators who embody the spirit and enthusiasm of its target audience, eBay positioned itself as not just a marketplace but a hub for inspiration and community.

The narrative series format catered to the audience’s preference for immersive, detailed content, which then helped foster a stronger connection with the brand.

5. Apple: The Shot on iPhone Challenge

When: Ongoing (Launched in 2015)

The world’s most popular smartphone manufacturer, Apple, takes great pride in the quality of images that can be captured on its devices.

To highlight the great photos that it can take, it launched a competition in 2015 that asked iPhone users to “ capture the little things in a big way .”

Photographers were then invited to share their images on Instagram and other social media sites using the hashtag #ShotOniPhone.

A panel of judges then selected 10 winners from tens of thousands of entries, which were then featured on Apple’s website, the company’s Instagram, and on 10,000+ billboards in 25 countries.

It has since become an annual campaign for the brand.

• The first round of the campaign had more than 6.5 billion impressions.
• It was mentioned by 24,000 influencers, with a 95% positive comment rating.

User-generated content (UGC) is a low-investment way for companies to promote their brand on social media, but this isn’t the reason for this campaign’s success.

Instead, Shot on iPhone encourages people to discuss the campaign, which closely aligns with Apple’s reputation for creativity, lifestyle, and innovation.

It encouraged existing users to participate in product launches and builds a sense of excitement about being part of the iPhone community.

Additionally, it gives iPhone users a sense of being part of something cool, which everyone likes.

6. Spotify: Spotify Wrapped

When: Ongoing (Launched in 2019)

In 2019, Spotify launched a campaign where users received a year-end round-up of their listening habits on the platform.

Using personalized in-app data, Spotify Wrapped gives you access to an exclusive, interactive story (or, in the past, a webpage) that shows you details like:

• Your most listened to artists, genres, and songs.
• Your top podcasts.
• The total time you spent listening for the year.
• New artists you discovered.

The data is presented in a visually appealing way that is formatted specifically for sharing to Instagram Stories (and elsewhere) – and Spotify encourages users to share far and wide.

Now, several years later, Spotify Wrapped has become an event that users anticipate and talk about even ahead of time.

It has evolved to serve users with new tidbits of information – such as what international city you’re aligned with based on your listening habits – and has succeeded at creating a tentpole social media marketing moment.

• In 2022, 156 million users engaged with Wrapped.
• In 2021, that number was reportedly 120 million .
• There were 425 million Tweets about Spotify Wrapped in the first three days after its launch in 2022.

Spotify combines two big psychological triggers in this campaign: personalization and fear of missing out (FOMO).

The app provides a personalized story for each user. You can see how your music taste developed through the years and what songs accompanied you in your life. The visualizations and gamification make it super engaging and capture people’s attention.

By enabling and encouraging sharing on social media, Spotify amplifies the campaign’s reach. It creates a sense of community in which users want to share their results with others – and see where they differ from their friends.

People naturally wanted to show off their highlights to their friends, thus making more people eager to try this experience.

7.  Freeform: Cruel Summer Influencer Nostalgia Campaign

After record-breaking viewership of season one of “Cruel Summer,” Freeform needed to reignite interest in the show’s second season.

So, the brand put together a social media campaign built around a classic tactic: nostalgia.

Collaborating with six popular Instagram meme accounts and throwback influencers like Lance Bass and Mario Lopez, the network leveraged ’90s nostalgia to create buzz around the new anthology format of Cruel Summer.

• The campaign garnered a total reach of over 22 million and 3.7 million organic impressions.
• A top post by ThirtyAF achieved a 6.5% engagement rate.
• The brand saw a unanimously positive sentiment from fans who expressed excitement for the new season.

Nostalgia has proven itself to be an extremely powerful marketing tactic – and that’s especially true on social media.

Freeform’s campaign leveraged the power of nostalgia marketing – and its audience’s love for the ’90s – to drive impressive social media engagement.

Additionally, partnering with trusted social media influencers further amplified the impact of the campaign.

This innovative approach – combined with the excitement for new stories – led to a universally positive reception, proving that a well-curated throwback theme can effectively drum up anticipation and broaden viewer interest.

8. Hulu Originals: Only Murders In The Building

In a strategic move to captivate audiences and announce the first season of “Only Murders in the Building,” Hulu partnered with Home Brew Agency to craft an Instagram campaign that reflected the mysterious tones of the show itself.

The strategy centered around transforming the Instagram feed into an extension of the show’s universe, complete with a detailed mosaic of the fictional Arconia building.

The campaign also highlighted the star-studded cast of Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez through character spotlights that introduced and teased the evolving dynamics between the main characters to interactively immerse followers in the series’ murder mystery.

Original videos and games were designed to spark curiosity and speculation among fans without revealing too much, maintaining the suspense that is the lifeblood of any whodunit.

• The @onlymurdershulu Instagram account quickly grew to 116,000 followers.
• As a result, the show launched as Hulu’s “Most-Watched Comedy Premiere in Hulu History” and the most-watched Hulu Original comedy on premiere day.

Hulu Originals did a number of things right here.

Firstly, it leveraged Instagram to extend the story world of the series and engage fans on a platform where they’re already active and invested.

The brand made use of the show’s considerable star power to activate a broad fan base across different demographics and generate excitement and curiosity.

By introducing an immersive social media experience that focused on mystery and teasing elements of the show piece-by-piece, Hulu Originals expanded the show’s narrative beyond the screen, heightened anticipation, and invited social media fans to join in on the fun.

This holistic approach not only solidified the show’s online presence but also played a crucial role in driving its record-breaking viewership on Hulu, demonstrating the power of social media in amplifying television narratives

9.  Bobbie: @Bobbie Instagram Handle

Bobbie, a baby formula brand, is on a mission to reshape societal perceptions around infant nutrition.

In 2023, the brand set out with an objective to leverage Instagram to cultivate a supportive, diverse community for modern parents.

Central to the brand’s mission was to make the tumultuous first year of parenting less daunting by using Instagram to bond over shared experiences within the first year of parenthood and help parents feel less alone.

To do so, the brand focused on showing the real, parent-driven team behind the scenes at Bobbie, telling the powerful stories of challenges real Bobbie parents face (such as infertility and systemic injustices in maternal care). It even responded with real-time support, such as Uber-delivered formula to Instagram followers experiencing emergencies.

• Total engagements increased to 307,000 – a 338% jump from the previous year.
• Increased total impressions to 162 million – a 334% jump from the previous year.
• Followers grew to 113,000 – a 37% rise from the year beforehand.

Bobbie’s strategy resonated deeply with its audience by focusing on authenticity.

By openly addressing the complexities of parenting, offering tangible support, and spotlighting real stories, Bobbie not only fostered a community but also positioned itself as a brand that truly understands and advocates for its customers’ needs.

In addition to enhancing its social metrics, the hands-on approach and commitment to addressing systemic challenges in parenthood – coupled with strategic storytelling and community engagement – also solidified the brand as a leader in championing the well-being of parents and children alike.

10. BuzzFeed: Tasty

You’ve probably seen these quick and easy recipe videos popping up all over your Facebook news feed.

BuzzFeed’s Tasty videos are essentially cooking shows for the social media generation.

These videos, typically lasting less than two minutes, deliver on-trend recipes to a highly engaged audience.

• Nearly 15 months after launching, Tasty published 2,000 recipe videos, giving the brand a steady stream of new content.
• Videos reached around 500 million users monthly.
• The brand has over 105 million Facebook fans.

For starters, there’s the content.

Tasty tapped into the inherent shareability of food content and the fact that almost everyone can relate to food – it has a place in all of our lives.

But more importantly, Tasty and Proper Tasty have exploded on Facebook because the content is tailor-made for that platform.

The team at BuzzFeed clearly observed video trends on Facebook and jumped while the time was ripe.

By producing high-quality, visually appealing videos that users could easily replicate at home, Tasty not only entertained but also provided value, making it a go-to resource for culinary inspiration.

The videos are optimized for Facebook’s autoplay feature, which starts playing videos without the sound on.

You don’t need sound to see, for example, a 45-second guide to making a cheese-stuffed pizza pretzel .

11.  Planet Fitness: Home Work-Ins

In 2020, with the world grappling with lockdowns and gym closures, Planet Fitness set out to leverage Facebook to revolutionize home fitness.

As many of us scaled back our physical activity in order to shelter in place, Planet Fitness launched “ The Home Work-In ” series.

This innovative campaign transformed Facebook Live into a virtual gym, offering free, daily live workouts to motivate people globally.

To make it happen, the company equipped trainers across the country with the necessary tech to broadcast from their homes. These sessions featured professional trainers, celebrities, and athletes, ensuring variety and broad appeal.

• Over 373 million total campaign impressions.
• Viewed by over 208 million people across 37 countries.
• Increase the average watch time of Planet Fitness video content by 200%.
• Drove over 4.3 million new Facebook followers.

Planet Fitness’s Home Work-In campaign brilliantly tapped into the needs of a global audience confined to their homes, craving movement and community.

By leveraging Facebook Live, it provided real-time, interactive fitness solutions that were accessible and free, breaking down barriers to exercise.

The strategic use of celebrities and athletes added star power, while the quick launch just days after widespread closures highlighted the brand’s agility and commitment to its members.

X (Formerly Twitter)

12. nickelodeon: a message from steve – blue’s clues 25th anniversary.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of “Blue’s Clues,” Nickelodeon decided to use X (Twitter) to reconnect with the now-adult audience who had cherished the show as children.

The strategy was to evoke nostalgia and warmth by reminding them of the timeless bond they shared with the show, using a special message from the original host, Steve.

The centerpiece of the celebration was a “ Message From Steve ,” a video where Steve directly addressed the audience after decades.

The script, developed in close collaboration with Steve, touched on universal themes of adulthood, such as jobs, families, and student loans, while also acknowledging the growth and journeys of the audience since they last met Steve.

By using X (Twitter) as the distribution platform, Nickelodeon strategically featured Steve’s message in an area where it knew the conversation would flourish.

• Over 40 million views.
• Close to 800,000 retweets.
• 2 million likes.
• Over 222 million impressions and 18 million engagements.
• It was the most engaging tweet of all time for any ViacomCBS account.
• Blue’s Clues and Steve were a trending topic on social media for several days, with fans sharing their emotional reactions, memories, and more.
• Celebrities, such as Seth Rogen and Blake Lively, and brands like XBOX and JCPenney engaged with the tweet.

Steve’s return tapped into a deep well of nostalgia, which (as we’ve discussed above) is a powerful tool for engaging social media content.

It encouraged and allowed people to reconnect with childhood memories, and the sincerity of the message resonated with social media audiences all over the world.

By addressing the shared experiences of growing up and acknowledging the challenges of adulthood, the campaign fostered a powerful sense of community among viewers.

13. Busch: #PassMeABusch

Busch Light had an ambitious goal: to dominate social media conversations on National Beer Day by making Busch Light the most talked-about beer brand.

In order to do that, it mobilized its passionate fanbase on X (Twitter) by turning April 7, 2022 into a celebration of beer, which was fueled by generous beer money giveaways.

The brand asked fans to share why they deserved to celebrate National Beer Day with Busch Light , promising $10,000 in beer money via CashApp for the most compelling reasons.

Throughout the day, it offered various giveaway amounts and “power hours” to maintain excitement and participation.

This led to fans sharing their unique, humorous, and sometimes poignant reasons for deserving a share of the beer money, generating widespread buzz and engagement.

• Bush Light became the No. 1 topic on X (Twitter) for National Beer Day.
• Over 40,000 social mentions.
• 1.7 million impressions.
• Nearly 3,000 new followers.
• The #PassMeABusch hashtag gained the company thousands of new followers.
• One of the biggest growth days Anheuser-Busch ever saw on Twitter.

The campaign’s genius lay in its simplicity and direct appeal to the audience’s love for beer and the brand.

By offering tangible rewards to fans, Busch Light created a sense of excitement that resonated across X (Twitter), and provided strong incentive for engagement.

After all, people are much more likely to engage if they believe they might get something out of it!

The mix of humor, relatability, and the thrill of potentially winning beer money incentivized people to celebrate and engage, propelling Busch Light to unprecedented social media prominence on National Beer Day.

14. Planters: The Death Of Mr. Peanut – #RIPPeanut

Perhaps one of the most bizarre social media campaigns: the beloved mascot of Planters snack food company died at the beginning of January 2020.

His death was announced with a tweet and later explained in a video ad posted to YouTube. The brand explained that Mr. Peanut had sacrificed his life to save his commercial co-stars, Matt Walsh and Wesley Snipes.

Planters invited fans to mourn the loss using the #RIPPeanut hashtag (which could also win them snacks).

The brands and regular social media users alike played along with the campaign, and it even got a mention on SNL.

The campaign was inspired by the reaction to celebrity deaths on social media. It aimed to repeat the same level of engagement that Tony Stark’s death caused in “Avengers: Endgame.”

Later, Mr. Peanut was reborn as a Baby Nut and now happily tweets from the Peanut Jr. account.

• The tweet announcing the death of Mr. Peanut has gathered 42,000 retweets.
• It generated an increase of 24,000 followers for the @MrPeanut Twitter account.

The campaign’s success hinged on its sheer audacity and the playful engagement with a topic as somber as death, presented in a way that was both humorous and captivating.

The premise was so unexpected and so wild that it immediately piqued the interest of users across X (Twitter) and quickly became a meme.

By tapping into meme culture and encouraging the participation of other users and brands, Planters created a viral phenomenon that transcended traditional marketing campaigns.

Many comedians and funny Twitter personalities jumped into the conversation, making jokes about Mr Peanut’s death – and other brands like Snickers, Crocs, and more joined in.

Planters did an exceptional job of taking the strange humor of the platform at the time, and putting that to use in an interactive and emotional rollercoaster that demonstrated the power of creative storytelling and community engagement.

15. P&G: #DistanceDance

Created during the pandemic (seeing a trend here?), Proctor and Gamble took to TikTok with a campaign designed to encourage social distancing.

Under the hashtag #DistanceDance, the company teamed up with social media and former competitive dancer Charli D’Amelio to help slow the spread of the coronavirus.

For the first 3 million videos posted to the short-form video apps, P&G donated to Feeding America and Matthew 25 Ministries.

• The hashtag has inspired more than 2.3 million posts to date.
• Charli D’Amelio’s video received almost 7 million likes and had more than 135,000 comments.

Recognizing that to reach a younger audience, it needed to reach them on their platform of choice, P&G jumped fully into this TikTok campaign.

Partnering with an established influencer helped the company reach an audience it would otherwise have struggled to connect with.

The give-back component also created a feel-good reason to participate in the hashtag challenge.

16. Chipotle Mexican Grill: Chipotle x Corn Kid

When an interview featuring 7-year-old Tariq (a.k.a. Corn Kid) expressing his love for corn captured TikTok’s heart and went viral, Chipotle saw an opportunity to jump into the conversation – and highlight its roasted chili-corn salsa.

Seemingly overnight, Chipotle jumped on the trend and orchestrated a collaboration with Corn Kid , creating a video of him enjoying his favorite corn salsa burrito bowl at Chipotle.

• Over 59.6 million views.
• Over 266,500 shares.
• Over 9.3 million likes.
• Nearly 13 million engagements across platforms.
• Over 110 million video views across platforms.
• Over 1.1 billion PR impressions from 768 stories.

The partnership allowed Chipotle to enter a cultural TikTok conversation as it was unfolding in a way that felt authentic and memorable.

By being the first brand to partner with Corn Kid, Chipotle set itself apart from the competition and found a unique way to highlight its product.

The campaign’s success also stemmed from its rapid response to a fleeting cultural moment, showcasing Chipotle’s agility in content creation and ability to authentically engage with Gen Z.

The clever use of real-time culture mixed with Chipotle’s narrative around fresh ingredients resonated well with audiences, as it showed the brand really walks the walk.

17.  State Farm: Jake Gets Social

In order to reach the next generation of consumers, State Farm launched a TikTok campaign around its iconic “ Jake from State Farm ” character.

To do so, it made Jake a content creator on TikTok, having him participate in popular challenges and trends, and partner with recognizable influencers and celebrities on the platform.

• Grew the Jake from State Farm TikTok page to 640,000 followers in 2022.
• The profile generated 1.75 million likes and 11.7 million organic views.
• Achieved a 14.5% average engagement rate on owned videos.

State Farm successfully integrated Jake into the TikTok environment in an authentic way by creating engaging, community-driven content.

By focusing on creative challenges, partnerships with popular TikTok creators and celebrities, and genuine interactions with other TikTok users, State Farm went beyond the typical corporate presence on social and built real connections with people.

On a platform that values novelty and authenticity, State Farm’s adaptability and attention to trends enabled it to lay a solid foundation for future engagement with Gen Z consumers.

18.  FOX Entertainment: Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test TikTok Challenge

Here’s a fun one.

In this example, FOX Entertainment introduced a brand new augmented reality (AR) obstacle course challenge on TikTok to promote the upcoming season of “Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test.”

Designed to reflect the show’s focus on overcoming physical and mental barriers, users participated in the challenge by trying to complete a 2-minute AR course using push-ups and planks.

• The AR experience collected over half a billion views.
• It also generated 42 million likes and 2 million shares, putting FOX Entertainment in the top 1% of effect creators on TikTok.

The AR challenge leveraged a unique capability of the TikTok platform to create something that was both interactive and immersive for users.

It also made sense for the brand to produce, as it aligned closely with the show’s themes.

Whether or not you knew about the show beforehand, you could enjoy the exciting AR challenge – and develop an awareness of the show in the meantime.

The success of this campaign underscores the power of creative content strategies that leverage emerging technologies to connect with audiences in meaningful and memorable ways.

19. Harvard Business Review: Special Coverage: Coronavirus

Because it’s so commonly used as a professional networking site, it’s easy to forget that LinkedIn is a social media platform just like Facebook or YouTube.

Harvard Business Review recognized it could fill a valuable role during the height of the pandemic by offering resources about the coronavirus.

Gathering many resources in one convenient place, it provided a credible source of information at a time when misinformation was running rampant.

The special coverage included information about developing work-from-home policies, responding to new variants, and helping find a new normal.

The Numbers

• The HBR has over 14 million followers, many of whom benefited from this information.

From fears of microchipping to governmental conspiracies, the sheer amount of outright false information about COVID-19 was staggering.

On top of this, this was uncharted territory for businesses of all types.

Leveraging the credibility of its parent institution, HBR provided quality, factual advice for dealing with a wide variety of pandemic-related issues.

20.  Verizon: #NotDone

In 2020, we saw the 100th anniversary of women winning the right to vote.

To mark the occasion, Verizon launched the Future Fund , dedicating $5 million to nurture emerging female talent in technology and entertainment.

Then, the brand leveraged LinkedIn to creatively start a conversation about the historical underrepresentation of women and the roots of gender bias by creating posthumous LinkedIn profiles for pioneering women from history – such as Ada Lovelace, Dorothy Lavinia Brown, Chien-Shiung Wu, and more.

The campaign was designed to remind others that – until there are more women in tech and entertainment – we are #NotDone.

• Created posthumous LinkedIn profiles for the first time ever .
• Engaged over 7 million users without any paid promotion.

By leveraging LinkedIn to reintroduce historical figures to the modern job market, Verizon not only paid homage to their contributions but also starkly highlighted the brand’s messaging and values around the ongoing struggle for gender equality.

The platform was an effective choice for reaching professionals in decision-making roles within tech and entertainment, and the format Verizon chose was inherently buzzy, engaging, and never seen before.

Key Takeaway

Reflecting on the examples we’ve covered here, it’s worth noting how different they all are; they run the gamut of platforms, audiences, tactics, and messaging.

But one thing that does tie these brands together is this: They all found innovative ways to appeal to their targets and provide real value to people.

From Instagram to TikTok, these campaigns demonstrate the power of connecting with audiences in meaningful and unexpected ways.

The lesson for brands is to keep pushing the boundaries of engagement by offering value and relevance that resonates with their audience.

Embrace the challenge, and perhaps your campaign will be the next to inspire and captivate – and next year, you might even be featured on this list.

More Resources:

• 10 New Social Media Platforms & Apps To Have On Your Radar
• How To Create Engaging Social Media Content: 12 Tips To Drive Results
• How to Dominate Social Media Marketing: A Complete Strategy Guide

Featured Image: metamorworks/Shutterstock

Anna Bredava is a Marketing Manager at Awario, a social media monitoring tool. She specializes in social listening and social ...

9 Highly Successful Market Research Examples

Free Website Traffic Checker

Discover your competitors' strengths and leverage them to achieve your own success

In the battle of instinct vs insight, there’s  clear evidence that data-driven decision-making pays off. 

A  McKinsey study into the impact of market research found that organizations using data to make decisions are more likely to be profitable, and can more effectively retain and acquire customers vs those who fail to use this approach.

I’ve curated nine of the best market research examples to help you find innovative ways to fuel growth , adapt, and impact change when and where it’s most needed. This post guides you through the problems faced along with the processes and tools used so you can replicate actions and outcomes in your business.

Market Research Example #1 – Understand the competitive landscape

In any business of any size, having in-depth insights into competitors’ audiences, campaigns, keywords, ( and more ) allows you to shape or refine your own plans for success. You can cut through the noise, see what’s working, and uncover opportunities for growth.

Since 2013, Wonderbly’s business has grown exponentially and now sells personalized books to over six million customers worldwide. In order to validate its go-to-market strategy, it needed granular insights into competitors and market trends.

Here’s how it played out.

1. Competitive insights

Challenge: Low visibility into a key competitor’s activity

Action: By analyzing competitor audience demographics that showed both gender and age distribution of its rival’s audience, Wonderbly saw its competition was better at attracting a younger audience.

Impact: Through the development of a new audience profile and key changes to future campaign strategies, it was able to grow the business and attract new customers.

This snapshot shows competitors’ website demographics side-by-side. While it was attracting a larger female audience of 62% vs. 56%, they saw their rivals were better at appealing to a male audience, with a respective split of 43% vs. 37%. In age distribution, its share in the 18-24 bracket was just 12% vs. 19%. Showing a clear opportunity to do more to reach that younger audience.

2. Keyword seasonality

Challenge: Lack of data to enter new markets

Action: Using seasonal trends keywords that showed where competitors were winning traffic from paid ad channels, Wonderbly discovered an emerging category (weddings and anniversaries) that was not addressed with its own offering.

Impact: By demonstrating competitors’ success and subsequent consumer interest, a new product line was developed. It went on to achieve a 69% revenue increase in books purchased by a more mature audience.

Keyword seasonality screenshot shows traffic leaders for specific keyword sets, their seasonality, traffic share , volume, and CPC data. This shows where competitors are using paid ads to win traffic share.

3. Audience data

Challenge: Limited view of audience browsing behavior

Action: By looking into audience data that showed which sites its visitors were cross-browsing, Wonderbly was able to determine audience loyalty vs. that of its rivals.

Impact: The information was used to forge new content-focused partnerships in the UK, US, and Canada with several organizations and drove more traffic to its own site as a result.

Audience overlap screenshot shows which sites its customers are browsing, how loyal they are, and presented new information about a referral partnership.

See the full story behind Wonderly’s success here.

Market Research Example #2 – Market Intelligence

Most business leaders and marketers have a solid understanding of their market. But if you want to stay ahead of the game, you need to reach deep inside a market, and often. Dynamic market intel enables you to do this and achieve sustainable growth by spotting emerging opportunities as they happen.

Red Arbor is the third-largest job board website in the world. Market Intelligence is an integral part of its business; with granular data across multiple markets, it knows the how and why behind individual brands’ performance.

Challenge: Difficult to see what’s happening across websites, apps, and digital entities in relevant markets.

Action: By using competitive and market intelligence tools, Red Arbor could see market movements and shifts in rival traffic share in all relevant markets as they occurred.

Impact: Key data can be constantly monitored to provide intel around emerging competitors and enables Red Arbor brands to quickly close the gap on respective market leaders. Based on these insights, it helps brands become the ultimate competitor and retain their positions as market leaders.

Read the full article about Red Arbur’s successful market research example here.

Market Research Example #3 – Entering new markets

Diversification is key to survival. For both product and service-based businesses, entering a new market can, without question, yield huge rewards. But before investing time and effort, the crucial work of fleshing out the opportunity in its entirety is key.

Airbnb is a household name, and a huge part of its success has been breaking into new markets. Each market has unique factors, risks, and opportunities. When this global powerhouse wanted to enter the Israeli market, it needed to get a clear handle on both local and international leaders, along with emerging players; all of whom had deployed aggressive marketing efforts.

Let’s look at how it went on to achieve success in a bustling new market.

Challenge: Analyze a new, highly competitive market and get clear insights into its rivals’ traffic sources to enable them to build an effective marketing strategy.

Action: Airbnb already knew who the leaders and most active local competitors were, but to enter with confidence, it wanted to see its respective rivals’ growth strategies. Using detailed website analytics , it was able to see its top competitors were all focussed on four core marketing activities.

• Building partnerships with niche sites
• AdWords, display, and search campaigns
• Local social network ads via organic and paid campaigns
• Running local digital news publisher’s ads

The snapshot shows at a glance who the top industry players are, with booking.com attracting 1.4 million unique visitors in the period with a yearly change of 57% vs. Airbnb’s unique visitors of 249k and a traffic increase of 42%. Two key players are losing traffic, with a 42%+ reduction in traffic share. It also identifies five emerging players in the market with significant growth of over 3000%.

Airbnb chose to focus its resources on social marketing, display and search ads, and partnerships. Its findings revealed specific keywords, social sites, and referrals that enabled it to enter a new market in a position of strength.

Impact: It entered a new market with a 360-degree view of what marketing channels and tactics to use.

Stop Guessing, Start Analyzing

Get actionable insights for market research here

Market Research Example #4 – Business benchmarking & competitive landscaping

Benchmarking in business is a great way to see how well you’re doing. But it’s so much more than just this – it lets you discover, understand, improve, grow, and set goals. If there’s one crucial thing I want you to know about successful market research examples, it’s the importance of doing benchmarking­ – often and well.

Croud is a global digital marketing partner to some of the world’s greatest brands. It develops and iterates marketing strategies on a daily basis..

Want to find out how it consistently shapes successful growth strategies? Read on.

Challenge: Brand and category-level traffic analysis across different markets are limited.

Action: Using detailed site-level traffic data and competitor app engagement metrics , Cloud could quickly understand what sites people visit, traffic share, growth of a sector over time, and how a client’s own growth compares with its rivals.

Impact: The impact of market research intelligence on Croud’s business is multifaceted. It can serve clients’ fresh data insights that shape marketing channels and revenue opportunities. This, in turn, builds trust, loyalty, and revenue:

• A global lingerie client was able to fine-tune localized marketing strategies and adjust media mixes to reflect category benchmarks. Ad copy was ‘tweaked,’ and new audiences were uncovered.
• A video-on-demand client was alerted to emerging players entering the market, as well as what tactics were being used to obtain traffic.
• A homecare retail client has been able to see the successful ad channels of its clients and adjust the marketing mix accordingly.

Read the full market research success story from Croud here.

Market Research Example #5 – New product development

When organizations develop plans for a new product or service, it requires insight, investment, and often a little intuition. Dynamic market intel can help you reveal shifts in consumer trends or behaviors before your rivals.

As a business in the travel sector, the pandemic hit Staysure harder than most – in fact the travel sector experienced losses of around 70% year on year. Market demands became an anomaly, and many rivals were forced to close their doors. To survive one of the toughest periods a business could ever face, Staysure needed to pivot, adapt, and go in a new direction.

Here’s how it turned things around.

Challenge: Survive the global pandemic and pivot its digital marketing strategy to meet the demand for new products in a shifting industry.

Action: Using Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence, Staysure analyzed competitors’ marketing tactics in real-time. This continuous monitoring enabled it to know when post-lockdown recoveries were occurring in real-time and allowed it to spot emerging trends , one of which was identified as an opportunity to bring a new product to market to address a shift in consumer demand.

Impact: Armed with this intel, it was able to develop a new insurance product that protected consumers against cancellations, medical expenses, and repatriation.

See more about how Staysure identified a new product opportunity for its business during one of the most challenging of times.

Market Research Example #6 – Shape stronger strategies

Making key business decisions about the future is tough at the best of times. Add in a global pandemic, the possible end of globalization as we know it, and who knows what other variables – business leaders have never (likely) known a time like it. Creating future-proof strategies is a must for any organization, and with the current climate, it’s harder than ever. A data-informed approach is the only logical route to take at any time, but none more so than now.

eToro is a market-leading social investing platform with a presence in over 100 countries and more than 27 million registered users. Each region operates within a different set of regulations and caters to unique market demands. To support eToro’s international expansion, the most up-to-date and accurate intel is needed to spearhead successful customer acquisition efforts across the globe.

Challenge: Finding reliable, competitive intelligence across international markets in a timely fashion

Action: The dedicated media buying at eToro used Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence to monitor competitor campaigns and evaluate potential media outlets, partnerships, and ad networks. Using deeper insights into website traffic, trends, and competitors’ campaigns, it could evaluate trends periodically, at both a regional and national level, to discover new traffic sources, evaluate and optimize existing media partnerships, and conduct keyword research each month.

Impact: The improved access to granular data insights has helped eToro negotiate with its publishers. As a result of being able to clearly see ad placement and creative campaign performance, it has improved ROI and increased its ability to out-trade rivals and gain market share .

Read more about how the team at eToro used digital insights to save time and make smarter decisions.

Market Research Example #7 – Identify the target audience

Every successful market research example I’ve ever seen starts and ends with the customer. Buyer personas shape product, price, and placement – and the development of these personas are relevant to all organizations. Being able to clearly identify a target audience in any market is crucial. Market dynamics mean a target audience is susceptible to change, so even established businesses need to keep watch.

Simplr is a customer support solution for growing brands, delivering staffing solutions via remote specialists and AI. As with any service-based business, being able to find and attract the right audience is crucial for growth and sustainability. It used market research to find and qualify high-caliber prospects and secure a more effective sales process.

Challenge: Targeting the right customers at the right time

Action: Simplr was able to get a detailed view of which new brands were growing the fastest by using digital performance data. This gave its sales team the ability to identify, qualify and prioritize potential companies based on solution fit and increasing need. Using a range of reports that show monthly traffic changes and traffic spikes in a custom sector, it saw high-growth sites with an expanding customer base and with this, an increased need for support services like Simplr.

Impact: Market sizing is now more dynamic and well-informed than ever before. Sales efficiency has increased, lead quality has improved, and sales performance is more effective as outreach is done in a more timely manner. Now, Simplr can identify and reach out to prospects during peak growth periods, and it’s seeing better conversions as a result.

Read more about how Simplr used successful market research to close more deals and improve pipeline efficiency here.

Market Research Example #8 – Find out what marketing channels deliver ROI

In good times and bad, it’s important to optmize marketing spend to ensure you invest time, efforts, and money in channels that deliver. A great example of market research in action is to apply research efforts and take the time to know which channels work, and where rival’s are winning and losing in your space.

Anything is Possible (AIP)  is a data-driven, communications strategy, media planning & buying company that covers all digital and offline media. Needless to say, it’s a business that depends on reliable, insightful, timely data to impact its clients and their goals.

Challenge: During COVID, a key client (the Institute of Cancer Research) faced declining donations. To survive, it needed to find new ways to find and convert audiences to donate.

Action: AIP utilized Similarweb’s Digital Research Intelligence to do a basic competitive analysis on key rivals of its client. This identified which channels were optimal, and where the most referrals on rival sites were originating from. It shows that premium publisher sites, such as The Guardian were sending significant traffic to competitor sites. With this information, it was able to develop a paid-ads campaign that displayed advertising on targetted guardian.com pages.

Impact: The campaign was a huge success, exceeding previous campaign conversion rates by 817%. Read more about how AIP used Similarweb to understand the right marketing channels to use.

Market Research Example #9 – Trendspotting to find growth opportunities

During the pandemic, many companies in the hospitality sector were forced to close their doors. It was a case of fight or flight, and there were clear winners and losers. Having the ability to spot industry trends and adapt fast was key to the survival of many firms. In this market research example, we explore how one consulting firm was able to help its customers pivot and thrive during turbulent times.

Wiideman Consulting Group provides multi-location brands with SEO research, audits, and strategy services.

Challenge: During the pandemic, food chains had to pivot from offering dining-in services to takeout and delivery services. With IHOP and Applebee’s as key clients of its firm, it needed to develop robust strategies quickly to help its clients survive. With consumers performing non-banded searches to find food delivery and take-out services, these traditional dine-in venues have no visibility online and were at risk of not being found by people looking to order alternative dining solutions while dine-in restaurants were closed.

  Action: Using Similarweb, it identified the right keyword opportunities, industry trends, and delivery service provider insights. This enabled it to develop a strategy that focused on increasing visibility in the locations where the business could provide takeaway and delivery services. With this data, it was able to help reposition brands within the search engine results pages and optimize content to generate leads and sales.

Doing this market research enabled it to make three key changes.

• Optimize the Google My Business profile to emphasize new service options for lunch, evening, and family meals.
• Design and deploy optimized content with new delivery and takeout subpages for each location.
• Addition of the ‘start order’ button as a floating call-to-action across all localized pages.

Impact: Driven by Similarweb insights, these tactics delivered favorable results for both of its clients in the hospitality sector.

• Organic traffic for both brands improved by 63% & 37%
• Revenues increased by 167% & 70% yoy

Ultimately, this market research enabled its clients to adapt to a changing market, and thrive when many others were forced to cease trading.

You can view the full write-up here to hear more about this success story.

Market research isn’t a one-and-done activity – rather, it’s a highly-habitual process and a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal. Due to fast-changing market dynamics, business leaders and strategists need market insights on the fly to respond and react to shifts in consumer behavior while staying focused on growth.

I’ve shared with you nine market research examples demonstrating how companies around the globe have successfully used market analysis to strategize, adapt, and grow. Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence impacted each of these examples, helping take the guesswork out of market research; so you can confidently make informed strategic decisions to grow your business.

by Liz March

Digital Research Specialist

Liz March has 15 years of experience in content creation. She enjoys the outdoors, F1, and reading, and is pursuing a BSc in Environmental Science.

Related Posts

Importance of Market Research: 9 Reasons Why It’s Crucial for Your Business

Audience Segmentation: Definition, Importance & Types

Geographic Segmentation: Definition, Pros & Cons, Examples, and More

Demographic Segmentation: The Key To Transforming Your Marketing Strategy

Unlocking Consumer Behavior: What Makes Your Customers Tick?

Customer Segmentation: Expert Tips on Understanding Your Audience

Wondering what similarweb can do for your business.

Give it a try or talk to our insights team — don’t worry, it’s free!

• Free Resources

14 Market Research Examples

This article was originally published in the MarketingSherpa email newsletter .

Example #1: National bank’s A/B testing

You can learn what customers want by conducting experiments on real-life customer decisions using A/B testing. When you ensure your tests do not have any validity threats, the information you garner can offer very reliable insights into customer behavior.

Here’s an example from Flint McGlaughlin, CEO of MarketingSherpa and MECLABS Institute, and the creator of its  online marketing course .

A national bank was working with MECLABS to discover how to increase the number of sign-ups for new checking accounts.

Customers who were interested in checking accounts could click on an “Open in Minutes” link on the bank’s homepage.

Creative Sample #1: Anonymized bank homepage

After clicking on the homepage link, visitors were taken to a four-question checking account selector tool.

Creative Sample #2: Original checking account landing page — account recommendation selector tool

After filling out the selector tool, visitors were taken to a results page that included a suggested package (“Best Choice”) along with a secondary option (“Second Choice”). The results page had several calls to action (CTAs). Website visitors were able to select an account and begin pre-registration (“Open Now”) or find out more information about the account (“Learn More”), go back and change their answers (“Go back and change answers”), or manually browse other checking options (“Other Checking Options”).

Creative Sample #3: Original checking account landing page — account recommendation selector tool results page

After going through the experience, the MECLABS team hypothesized that the selector tool wasn’t really delivering on the expectation the customer had after clicking on the “Open in Minutes” CTA. They created two treatments (new versions) and tested them against the control experience.

In the first treatment, the checking selector tool was removed, and instead, customers were directly presented with three account options in tabs from which customers could select.

Creative Sample #4: Checking account landing page Treatment #1

The second treatment’s landing page focused on a single product and had only one CTA. The call-to-action was similar to the CTA customers clicked on the homepage to get to this page — “Open Now.”

Creative Sample #5: Checking account landing page Treatment #2

Both treatments increased account applications compared to the control landing page experience, with Treatment #2 generating 65% more applicants at a 98% level of confidence.

Creative Sample #6: Results of bank experiment that used A/B testing

You’ll note the Level of Confidence in the results. With any research tactic or tool you use to learn about customers, you have to consider whether the information you’re getting really represents most customers, or if you’re just seeing outliers or random chance.

With a high Level of Confidence like this, it is more likely the results actually represent a true difference between the control and treatment landing pages and that the results aren’t just a random event.

The other factor to consider is — testing in and of itself will not produce results. You have to use testing as research to actually learn about the customer and then make changes to better serve the customer.

In the video How to Discover Exactly What the Customer Wants to See on the Next Click: 3 critical skills every marketer must master , McGlaughlin discussed this national bank experiment and explained how to use prioritization, identification and deduction to discover what your customers want.

This example was originally published in Marketing Research: 5 examples of discovering what customers want .

Example #2: Consumer Reports’ market intelligence research from third-party sources

The first example covers A/B testing. But keep in mind, ill-informed A/B testing isn’t market research, it’s just hoping for insights from random guesses.

In other words, A/B testing in a vacuum does not provide valuable information about customers. What you are testing is crucial, and then A/B testing is a means to help better understand whether insights you have about the customer are either validated or refuted by actual customer behavior. So it’s important to start with some research into potential customers and competitors to inform your A/B tests.

For example, when MECLABS and MarketingExperiments (sister publisher to MarketingSherpa) worked with Consumer Reports on a public, crowdsourced A/B test, we provided a market intelligence report to our audience to help inform their test suggestions.

Every successful marketing test should confirm or deny an assumption about the customer. You need enough knowledge about the customer to create marketing messages you think will be effective.

For this public experiment to help marketers improve their split testing abilities, we had a real customer to work with — donors to Consumer Reports.

To help our audience better understand the customer, the MECLABS Marketing Intelligence team created the 26-page ConsumerReports Market Intelligence Research document (which you can see for yourself at that link).

This example was originally published in Calling All Writers and Marketers: Write the most effective copy for this Consumer Reports email and win a MarketingSherpa Summit package and Consumer Reports Value Proposition Test: What you can learn from a 29% drop in clickthrough .

Example #3: Virtual event company’s conversation

What if you don’t have the budget for A/B testing? Or any of the other tactics in this article?

Well, if you’re like most people you likely have some relationships with other human beings. A significant other, friends, family, neighbors, co-workers, customers, a nemesis (“Newman!”). While conducting market research by talking to these people has several validity threats, it at least helps you get out of your own head and identify some of your blind spots.

WebBabyShower.com’s lead magnet is a PDF download of a baby shower thank you card ‘swipe file’ plus some extras. “Women want to print it out and have it where they are writing cards, not have a laptop open constantly,” said Kurt Perschke, owner, WebBabyShower.com.

That is not a throwaway quote from Perschke. That is a brilliant insight, so I want to make sure we don’t overlook it. By better understanding customer behavior, you can better serve customers and increase results.

However, you are not your customer. So you must bridge the gap between you and them.

Often you hear marketers or business leaders review an ad or discuss a marketing campaign and say, “Well, I would never read that entire ad” or “I would not be interested in that promotion.” To which I say … who cares? Who cares what you would do? If you are not in the ideal customer set, sorry to dent your ego, but you really don’t matter. Only the customer does.

Perschke is one step ahead of many marketers and business leaders because he readily understands this. “Owning a business whose customers are 95% women has been a great education for me,” he said.

So I had to ask him, how did he get this insight into his customers’ behavior? Frankly, it didn’t take complex market research. He was just aware of this disconnect he had with the customer, and he was alert for ways to bridge the gap. “To be honest, I first saw that with my wife. Then we asked a few customers, and they confirmed it’s what they did also. Writing notes by hand is viewed as a ‘non-digital’ activity and reading from a laptop kinda spoils the mood apparently,” he said.

Back to WebBabyShower. “We've seen a [more than] 100% increase in email signups using this method, which was both inexpensive and evergreen,” Perschke said.

This example was originally published in Digital Marketing: Six specific examples of incentives that worked .

Example #4: Spiceworks Ziff Davis’ research-informed content marketing

Marketing research isn’t just to inform products and advertising messages. Market research can also give your brand a leg up in another highly competitive space – content marketing.

Don’t just jump in and create content expecting it to be successful just because it’s “free.” Conducting research beforehand can help you understand what your potential audience already receives and where they might need help but are currently being served.

When Spiceworks Ziff Davis (SWZD) published its annual State of IT report, it invested months in conducting primary market research, analyzing year-over-year trends, and finally producing the actual report.

“Before getting into the nuts and bolts of writing an asset, look at market shifts and gaps that complement your business and marketing objectives. Then, you can begin to plan, research, write, review and finalize an asset,” said Priscilla Meisel, Content Marketing Director, SWZD.

This example was originally published in Marketing Writing: 3 simple tips that can help any marketer improve results (even if you’re not a copywriter) .

Example #5: Business travel company’s guerilla research

There are many established, expensive tactics you can use to better understand customers.

But if you don’t have the budget for those tactics, and don’t know any potential customers, you might want to brainstorm creative ways you can get valuable information from the right customer target set.

Here’s an example from a former client of Mitch McCasland, Founding Partner and Director, Brand Inquiry Partners. The company sold a product related to frequent business flyers and was interested in finding out information on people who travel for a living. They needed consumer feedback right away.

“I suggested that they go out to the airport with a bunch of 20-dollar bills and wait outside a gate for passengers to come off their flight,” McCasland said. When people came off the flight, they were politely asked if they would answer a few questions in exchange for the incentive (the $20). By targeting the first people off the flight they had a high likelihood of reaching the first-class passengers.

This example was originally published in Guerrilla Market Research Expert Mitch McCasland Tells How You Can Conduct Quick (and Cheap) Research .

Example #6: Intel’s market research database

When conducting market research, it is crucial to organize your data in a way that allows you to easily and quickly report on it. This is especially important for qualitative studies where you are trying to do more than just quantify the data, but need to manage it so it is easier to analyze.

Anne McClard, Senior Researcher, Doxus worked with Shauna Pettit-Brown of Intel on a research project to understand the needs of mobile application developers throughout the world.

Intel needed to be able to analyze the data from several different angles, including segment and geography, a daunting task complicated by the number of interviews, interviewers, and world languages.

“The interviews were about an hour long, and pretty substantial,” McClard says. So, she needed to build a database to organize the transcripts in a way that made sense.

Different types of data are useful for different departments within a company; once your database is organized you can sort it by various threads.

The Intel study had three different internal sponsors. "When it came to doing the analysis, we ended up creating multiple versions of the presentation targeted to individual audiences," Pettit-Brown says.

The organized database enabled her to go back into the data set to answer questions specific to the interests of the three different groups.

This example was originally published in 4 Steps to Building a Qualitative Market Research Database That Works Better .

Example #7: National security survey’s priming

When conducting market research surveys, the way you word your questions can affect customers’ response. Even the way you word previous questions can put customers in a certain mindset that will skew their answers.

For example, when people were asked if they thought the U.S. government should spend money on an anti-missile shield, the results appeared fairly conclusive. Sixty-four percent of those surveyed thought the country should and only six percent were unsure, according to Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls .

But when pollsters added the option, "...or are you unsure?" the level of uncertainty leaped from six percent to 33 percent. When they asked whether respondents would be upset if the government took the opposite course of action from their selection, 59 percent either didn’t have an opinion or didn’t mind if the government did something differently.

This is an example of how the way you word questions can change a survey’s results. You want survey answers to reflect customer’s actual sentiments that are as free of your company’s previously held biases as possible.

This example was originally published in Are Surveys Misleading? 7 Questions for Better Market Research .

Example #8: Visa USA’s approach to getting an accurate answer

As mentioned in the previous example, the way you ask customers questions can skew their responses with your own biases.

However, the way you ask questions to potential customers can also illuminate your understanding of them. Which is why companies field surveys to begin with.

“One thing you learn over time is how to structure questions so you have a greater likelihood of getting an accurate answer. For example, when we want to find out if people are paying off their bills, we'll ask them to think about the card they use most often. We then ask what the balance was on their last bill after they paid it,” said Michael Marx, VP Research Services, Visa USA.

This example was originally published in Tips from Visa USA's Market Research Expert Michael Marx .

Example #9: Hallmark’s private members-only community

Online communities are a way to interact with and learn from customers. Hallmark created a private members-only community called Idea Exchange (an idea you could replicate with a Facebook or LinkedIn Group).

The community helped the greeting cards company learn the customer’s language.

“Communities…let consumers describe issues in their own terms,” explained Tom Brailsford, Manager of Advancing Capabilities, Hallmark Cards. “Lots of times companies use jargon internally.”

At Hallmark they used to talk internally about “channels” of distribution. But consumers talk about stores, not channels. It is much clearer to ask consumers about the stores they shop in than what channels they shop.

For example, Brailsford clarified, “We say we want to nurture, inspire, and lift one’s spirits. We use those terms, and the communities have defined those terms for us. So we have learned how those things play out in their lives. It gives us a much richer vocabulary to talk about these things.”

This example was originally published in Third Year Results from Hallmark's Online Market Research Experiment .

Example #10: L'Oréal’s social media listening

If you don’t want the long-term responsibility that comes with creating an online community, you can use social media listening to understand how customers talking about your products and industry in their own language.

In 2019, L'Oréal felt the need to upgrade one of its top makeup products – L'Oréal Paris Alliance Perfect foundation. Both the formula and the product communication were outdated – multiple ingredients had emerged on the market along with competitive products made from those ingredients.

These new ingredients and products were overwhelming consumers. After implementing new formulas, the competitor brands would advertise their ingredients as the best on the market, providing almost magical results.

So the team at L'Oréal decided to research their consumers’ expectations instead of simply crafting a new formula on their own. The idea was to understand not only which active ingredients are credible among the audience, but also which particular words they use while speaking about foundations in general.

The marketing team decided to combine two research methods: social media listening and traditional questionnaires.

“For the most part, we conduct social media listening research when we need to find out what our customers say about our brand/product/topic and which words they use to do it. We do conduct traditional research as well and ask questions directly. These surveys are different because we provide a variety of readymade answers that respondents choose from. Thus, we limit them in terms of statements and their wording,” says Marina Tarandiuk, marketing research specialist, L'Oréal Ukraine.

“The key value of social media listening (SML) for us is the opportunity to collect people’s opinions that are as ‘natural’ as possible. When someone leaves a review online, they are in a comfortable environment, they use their ‘own’ language to express themselves, there is no interviewer standing next to them and potentially causing shame for their answer. The analytics of ‘natural’ and honest opinions of our customers enables us to implement the results in our communication and use the same language as them,” Tarandiuk said.

The team worked with a social media listening tool vendor to identify the most popular, in-demand ingredients discussed online and detect the most commonly used words and phrases to create a “consumer glossary.”

Questionnaires had to confirm all the hypotheses and insights found while monitoring social media. This part was performed in-house with the dedicated team. They created custom questionnaires aiming to narrow down all the data to a maximum of three variants that could become the base for the whole product line.

“One of our recent studies had a goal to find out which words our clients used to describe positive and negative qualities of [the] foundation. Due to a change in [the] product’s formula, we also decided to change its communication. Based on the opinions of our customers, we can consolidate the existing positive ideas that our clients have about the product,” Tarandiuk said.

To find the related mentions, the team monitored not only the products made by L'Oréal but also the overall category. “The search query contained both brand names and general words like foundation, texture, smell, skin, pores, etc. The problem was that this approach ended up collecting thousands of mentions, not all of which were relevant to the topic,” said Elena Teselko, content marketing manager, YouScan (L'Oréal’s social media listening tool).

So the team used artificial intelligence-based tagging that divided mentions according to the category, features, or product type.

This approach helped the team discover that customers valued such foundation features as not clogging pores, a light texture, and not spreading. Meanwhile, the most discussed and appreciated cosmetics component was hyaluronic acid.

These exact phrases, found with the help of social media monitoring, were later used for marketing communication.

Creative Sample #7: Marketing communicating for personal care company with messaging based on discoveries from market research

“Doing research and detecting audience’s interests BEFORE starting a campaign is an approach that dramatically lowers any risks and increases chances that the campaign would be appreciated by customers,” Teselko said.

This example was originally published in B2C Branding: 3 quick case studies of enhancing the brand with a better customer experience .

Example #11: Levi’s ethnographic research

In a focus group or survey, you are asking customers to explain something they may not even truly understand. Could be why they bought a product. Or what they think of your competitor.

Ethnographic research is a type of anthropology in which you go into customers’ homes or places of business and observe their actual behavior, behavior they may not understand well enough to explain to you.

While cost prohibitive to many brands, and simply unfeasible for others, it can elicit new insights into your customers.

Michael Perman, Senior Director Cultural Insights, Levi Strauss & Co. uses both quantitative and qualitative research on a broad spectrum, but when it comes to gathering consumer insight, he focuses on in-depth ethnographic research provided by partners who specialize in getting deep into the “nooks and crannies of consumer life in America and around the world.” For example, his team spends time in consumers’ homes and in their closets. They shop with consumers, looking for the reality of a consumer’s life and identifying themes that will enable designers and merchandisers to better understand and anticipate consumer needs.

Perman then puts together multi-sensory presentations that illustrate the findings of research. For example, “we might recreate a teenager’s bedroom and show what a teenage girl might have on her dresser.”

This example was originally published in How to Get Your Company to Pay Attention to Market Research Results: Tips from Levi Strauss .

Example #12: eBags’ ethnographic research

Ethnographic research isn’t confined to a physical goods brand like Levi’s. Digital brands can engage in this form of anthropology as well.

While usability testing in a lab is useful, it does miss some of the real-world environmental factors that play a part in the success of a website. Usability testing alone didn’t create a clear enough picture for Gregory Casey, User Experience Designer and Architect, eBags.

“After we had designed our mobile and tablet experience, I wanted to run some contextual user research, which basically meant seeing how people used it in the wild, seeing how people are using it in their homes. So that’s exactly what I did,” Gregory said.

He found consumers willing to open their home to him and be tested in their normal environment. This meant factors like the television, phone calls and other family members played a part in how they experienced the eBags mobile site.

“During these interview sessions, a lot of times we were interrupted by, say, a child coming over and the mother having to do something for the kid … The experience isn’t sovereign. It’s not something where they just sit down, work through a particular user flow and complete their interaction,” Gregory said.

By watching users work through the site as they would in their everyday life, Gregory got to see what parts of the site they actually use.

This example was originally published in Mobile Marketing: 4 takeaways on how to improve your mobile shopping experience beyond just responsive design .

Example #13: John Deere’s shift from product-centric market research to consumer-centric research

One of the major benefits of market research is to overcome company blind spots. However, if you start with your blind spots – i.e., a product focus – you will blunt the effectiveness of your market research.

In the past, “they’d say, Here’s the product, find out how people feel about it,” explained David van Nostrand, Manager, John Deere's Global Market Research. “A lot of companies do that.” Instead, they should be saying, “Let's start with the customers: what do they want, what do they need?”

The solution? A new in-house program called “Category Experts” brings the product-group employees over as full team members working on specific research projects with van Nostrand’s team.

These staffers handle items that don’t require a research background: scheduling, meetings, logistics, communication and vendor management. The actual task they handle is less important than the fact that they serve as human cross-pollinators, bringing consumer-centric sensibility back to their product- focused groups.

For example, if van Nostrand’s team is doing research about a vehicle, they bring in staffers from the Vehicles product groups. “The information about vehicle consumers needs to be out there in the vehicle marketing groups, not locked in here in the heads of the researchers.”

This example was originally published in How John Deere Increased Mass Consumer Market Share by Revamping its Market Research Tactics .

Example #14: LeapFrog’s market research involvement throughout product development (not just at the beginning and the end)

Market research is sometimes thought of as a practice that can either inform the development of a product, or research consumer attitudes about developed products. But what about the middle?

Once the creative people begin working on product designs, the LeapFrog research department stays involved.

They have a lab onsite where they bring moms and kids from the San Francisco Bay area to test preliminary versions of the products. “We do a lot of hands-on, informal qualitative work with kids,” said Craig Spitzer, VP Marketing Research, LeapFrog. “Can they do what they need to do to work the product? Do they go from step A to B to C, or do they go from A to C to B?”

When designing the LeapPad Learning System, for example, the prototype went through the lab “a dozen times or so,” he says.

A key challenge for the research department is keeping and building the list of thousands of families who have agreed to be on call for testing. “We've done everything from recruiting on the Internet to putting out fliers in local schools, working through employees whose kids are in schools, and milking every connection we have,” Spitzer says.

Kids who test products at the lab are compensated with a free, existing product rather than a promise of the getting the product they're testing when it is released in the future.

This example was originally published in How LeapFrog Uses Marketing Research to Launch New Products .

Related resources

The Marketer’s Blind Spot: 3 ways to overcome the marketer’s greatest obstacle to effective messaging

Get Your Free Test Discovery Tool to Help Log all the Results and Discoveries from Your Company’s Marketing Tests

Marketing Research: 5 examples of discovering what customers want

Online Marketing Tests: How do you know you’re really learning anything?

Improve Your Marketing

Join our thousands of weekly case study readers.

Enter your email below to receive MarketingSherpa news, updates, and promotions:

Note: Already a subscriber? Want to add a subscription? Click Here to Manage Subscriptions

Get Better Business Results With a Skillfully Applied Customer-first Marketing Strategy

The customer-first approach of MarketingSherpa’s agency services can help you build the most effective strategy to serve customers and improve results, and then implement it across every customer touchpoint.

Get headlines, value prop, competitive analysis, and more.

Marketer Vs Machine

Marketer Vs Machine: We need to train the marketer to train the machine.

Free Marketing Course

Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages (with this free online marketing course)

Project and Ideas Pitch Template

A free template to help you win approval for your proposed projects and campaigns

Six Quick CTA checklists

These CTA checklists are specifically designed for your team — something practical to hold up against your CTAs to help the time-pressed marketer quickly consider the customer psychology of your “asks” and how you can improve them.

Infographic: How to Create a Model of Your Customer’s Mind

You need a repeatable methodology focused on building your organization’s customer wisdom throughout your campaigns and websites. This infographic can get you started.

Infographic: 21 Psychological Elements that Power Effective Web Design

To build an effective page from scratch, you need to begin with the psychology of your customer. This infographic can get you started.

Receive the latest case studies and data on email, lead gen, and social media along with MarketingSherpa updates and promotions.

• Your Email Account
• Customer Service Q&A
• Search Library
• Content Directory:

Questions? Contact Customer Service at [email protected]

© 2000-2024 MarketingSherpa LLC, ISSN 1559-5137 Editorial HQ: MarketingSherpa LLC, PO Box 50032, Jacksonville Beach, FL 32240

The views and opinions expressed in the articles of this website are strictly those of the author and do not necessarily reflect in any way the views of MarketingSherpa, its affiliates, or its employees.

9 Best Marketing Research Methods to Know Your Buyer Better [+ Examples]

Published: August 08, 2024

One of the most underrated skills you can have as a marketer is marketing research — which is great news for this unapologetic cyber sleuth.

From brand design and product development to buyer personas and competitive analysis, I’ve researched a number of initiatives in my decade-long marketing career.

And let me tell you: having the right marketing research methods in your toolbox is a must.

Market research is the secret to crafting a strategy that will truly help you accomplish your goals. The good news is there is no shortage of options.

How to Choose a Marketing Research Method

Thanks to the Internet, we have more marketing research (or market research) methods at our fingertips than ever, but they’re not all created equal. Let’s quickly go over how to choose the right one.

Free Market Research Kit

5 Research and Planning Templates + a Free Guide on How to Use Them in Your Market Research

• SWOT Analysis Template
• Survey Template
• Focus Group Template

Download Free

All fields are required.

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

1. Identify your objective.

What are you researching? Do you need to understand your audience better? How about your competition? Or maybe you want to know more about your customer’s feelings about a specific product.

Before starting your research, take some time to identify precisely what you’re looking for. This could be a goal you want to reach, a problem you need to solve, or a question you need to answer.

For example, an objective may be as foundational as understanding your ideal customer better to create new buyer personas for your marketing agency (pause for flashbacks to my former life).

Or if you’re an organic sode company, it could be trying to learn what flavors people are craving.

2. Determine what type of data and research you need.

Next, determine what data type will best answer the problems or questions you identified. There are primarily two types: qualitative and quantitative. (Sound familiar, right?)

• Qualitative Data is non-numerical information, like subjective characteristics, opinions, and feelings. It’s pretty open to interpretation and descriptive, but it’s also harder to measure. This type of data can be collected through interviews, observations, and open-ended questions.
• Quantitative Data , on the other hand, is numerical information, such as quantities, sizes, amounts, or percentages. It’s measurable and usually pretty hard to argue with, coming from a reputable source. It can be derived through surveys, experiments, or statistical analysis.

Understanding the differences between qualitative and quantitative data will help you pinpoint which research methods will yield the desired results.

For instance, thinking of our earlier examples, qualitative data would usually be best suited for buyer personas, while quantitative data is more useful for the soda flavors.

However, truth be told, the two really work together.

Qualitative conclusions are usually drawn from quantitative, numerical data. So, you’ll likely need both to get the complete picture of your subject.

For example, if your quantitative data says 70% of people are Team Black and only 30% are Team Green — Shout out to my fellow House of the Dragon fans — your qualitative data will say people support Black more than Green.

(As they should.)

Primary Research vs Secondary Research

You’ll also want to understand the difference between primary and secondary research.

Primary research involves collecting new, original data directly from the source (say, your target market). In other words, it’s information gathered first-hand that wasn’t found elsewhere.

Some examples include conducting experiments, surveys, interviews, observations, or focus groups.

Meanwhile, secondary research is the analysis and interpretation of existing data collected from others. Think of this like what we used to do for school projects: We would read a book, scour the internet, or pull insights from others to work from.

So, which is better?

Personally, I say any research is good research, but if you have the time and resources, primary research is hard to top. With it, you don’t have to worry about your source's credibility or how relevant it is to your specific objective.

You are in full control and best equipped to get the reliable information you need.

3. Put it all together.

Once you know your objective and what kind of data you want, you’re ready to select your marketing research method.

For instance, let’s say you’re a restaurant trying to see how attendees felt about the Speed Dating event you hosted last week.

You shouldn’t run a field experiment or download a third-party report on speed dating events; those would be useless to you. You need to conduct a survey that allows you to ask pointed questions about the event.

This would yield both qualitative and quantitative data you can use to improve and bring together more love birds next time around.

Best Market Research Methods for 2024

Now that you know what you’re looking for in a marketing research method, let’s dive into the best options.

Note: According to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing report, understanding customers and their needs is one of the biggest challenges facing marketers today. The options we discuss are great consumer research methodologies , but they can also be used for other areas.

Primary Research

1. interviews.

Interviews are a form of primary research where you ask people specific questions about a topic or theme. They typically deliver qualitative information.

I’ve conducted many interviews for marketing purposes, but I’ve also done many for journalistic purposes, like this profile on comedian Zarna Garg . There’s no better way to gather candid, open-ended insights in my book, but that doesn’t mean they’re a cure-all.

What I like: Real-time conversations allow you to ask different questions if you’re not getting the information you need. They also push interviewees to respond quickly, which can result in more authentic answers.

What I dislike: They can be time-consuming and harder to measure (read: get quantitative data) unless you ask pointed yes or no questions.

Best for: Creating buyer personas or getting feedback on customer experience, a product, or content.

2. Focus Groups

Focus groups are similar to conducting interviews but on a larger scale.

In marketing and business, this typically means getting a small group together in a room (or Zoom), asking them questions about various topics you are researching. You record and/or observe their responses to then take action.

They are ideal for collecting long-form, open-ended feedback, and subjective opinions.

One well-known focus group you may remember was run by Domino’s Pizza in 2009 .

After poor ratings and dropping over $100 million in revenue, the brand conducted focus groups with real customers to learn where they could have done better.

It was met with comments like “worst excuse for pizza I’ve ever had” and “the crust tastes like cardboard.” But rather than running from the tough love, it took the hit and completely overhauled its recipes.

The team admitted their missteps and returned to the market with better food and a campaign detailing their “Pizza Turn Around.”

The result? The brand won a ton of praise for its willingness to take feedback, efforts to do right by its consumers, and clever campaign. But, most importantly, revenue for Domino’s rose by 14.3% over the previous year.

The brand continues to conduct focus groups and share real footage from them in its promotion:

What I like: Similar to interviewing, you can dig deeper and pivot as needed due to the real-time nature. They’re personal and detailed.

What I dislike: Once again, they can be time-consuming and make it difficult to get quantitative data. There is also a chance some participants may overshadow others.

Best for: Product research or development

Pro tip: Need help planning your focus group? Our free Market Research Kit includes a handy template to start organizing your thoughts in addition to a SWOT Analysis Template, Survey Template, Focus Group Template, Presentation Template, Five Forces Industry Analysis Template, and an instructional guide for all of them. Download yours here now.

3. Surveys or Polls

Surveys are a form of primary research where individuals are asked a collection of questions. It can take many different forms.

They could be in person, over the phone or video call, by email, via an online form, or even on social media. Questions can be also open-ended or closed to deliver qualitative or quantitative information.

A great example of a close-ended survey is HubSpot’s annual State of Marketing .

In the State of Marketing, HubSpot asks marketing professionals from around the world a series of multiple-choice questions to gather data on the state of the marketing industry and to identify trends.

The survey covers various topics related to marketing strategies, tactics, tools, and challenges that marketers face. It aims to provide benchmarks to help you make informed decisions about your marketing.

It also helps us understand where our customers’ heads are so we can better evolve our products to meet their needs.

Apple is no stranger to surveys, either.

In 2011, the tech giant launched Apple Customer Pulse , which it described as “an online community of Apple product users who provide input on a variety of subjects and issues concerning Apple.”

"For example, we did a large voluntary survey of email subscribers and top readers a few years back."

While these readers gave us a long list of topics, formats, or content types they wanted to see, they sometimes engaged more with content types they didn’t select or favor as much on the surveys when we ran follow-up ‘in the wild’ tests, like A/B testing.”  

Pepsi saw similar results when it ran its iconic field experiment, “The Pepsi Challenge” for the first time in 1975.

The beverage brand set up tables at malls, beaches, and other public locations and ran a blindfolded taste test. Shoppers were given two cups of soda, one containing Pepsi, the other Coca-Cola (Pepsi’s biggest competitor). They were then asked to taste both and report which they preferred.

People overwhelmingly preferred Pepsi, and the brand has repeated the experiment multiple times over the years to the same results.

What I like: It yields qualitative and quantitative data and can make for engaging marketing content, especially in the digital age.

What I dislike: It can be very time-consuming. And, if you’re not careful, there is a high risk for scientific error.

Best for: Product testing and competitive analysis

Pro tip:  " Don’t make critical business decisions off of just one data set," advises Pamela Bump. "Use the survey, competitive intelligence, external data, or even a focus group to give you one layer of ideas or a short-list for improvements or solutions to test. Then gather your own fresh data to test in an experiment or trial and better refine your data-backed strategy."

Secondary Research

8. public domain or third-party research.

While original data is always a plus, there are plenty of external resources you can access online and even at a library when you’re limited on time or resources.

Some reputable resources you can use include:

• Pew Research Center
• McKinley Global Institute
• Relevant Global or Government Organizations (i.e United Nations or NASA)

It’s also smart to turn to reputable organizations that are specific to your industry or field. For instance, if you’re a gardening or landscaping company, you may want to pull statistics from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

If you’re a digital marketing agency, you could look to Google Research or HubSpot Research . (Hey, I know them!)

What I like: You can save time on gathering data and spend more time on analyzing. You can also rest assured the data is from a source you trust.

What I dislike: You may not find data specific to your needs.

Best for: Companies under a time or resource crunch, adding factual support to content

Pro tip: Fellow HubSpotter Iskiev suggests using third-party data to inspire your original research. “Sometimes, I use public third-party data for ideas and inspiration. Once I have written my survey and gotten all my ideas out, I read similar reports from other sources and usually end up with useful additions for my own research.”

9. Buy Research

If the data you need isn’t available publicly and you can’t do your own market research, you can also buy some. There are many reputable analytics companies that offer subscriptions to access their data. Statista is one of my favorites, but there’s also Euromonitor , Mintel , and BCC Research .

What I like: Same as public domain research

What I dislike: You may not find data specific to your needs. It also adds to your expenses.

Best for: Companies under a time or resource crunch or adding factual support to content

Which marketing research method should you use?

You’re not going to like my answer, but “it depends.” The best marketing research method for you will depend on your objective and data needs, but also your budget and timeline.

My advice? Aim for a mix of quantitative and qualitative data. If you can do your own original research, awesome. But if not, don’t beat yourself up. Lean into free or low-cost tools . You could do primary research for qualitative data, then tap public sources for quantitative data. Or perhaps the reverse is best for you.

Whatever your marketing research method mix, take the time to think it through and ensure you’re left with information that will truly help you achieve your goals.

Don't forget to share this post!

Related articles.

The Beginner's Guide to the Competitive Matrix [+ Templates]

What is a Competitive Analysis — and How Do You Conduct One?

SWOT Analysis: How To Do One [With Template & Examples]

28 Tools & Resources for Conducting Market Research

Market Research: A How-To Guide and Template

TAM, SAM & SOM: What Do They Mean & How Do You Calculate Them?

How to Run a Competitor Analysis [Free Guide]

5 Challenges Marketers Face in Understanding Audiences [New Data + Market Researcher Tips]

Causal Research: The Complete Guide

Free Guide & Templates to Help Your Market Research

Marketing software that helps you drive revenue, save time and resources, and measure and optimize your investments — all on one easy-to-use platform

• Follow University of Limerick on Facebook
• Follow University of Limerick on X/Twitter
• Follow University of Limerick on Instagram
• Follow University of Limerick on LinkedIn
• Follow University of Limerick on YouTube
• Follow University of Limerick on TikTok
• Search University of Limerick website

Ireland’s youngest female councillor graduates from University of Limerick

Newly elected Clare County Councillor, Rachel Hartigan credits her success to working twice as hard as the average candidate, as she graduated from University of Limerick today (Thursday) with a Bachelor of Arts in European Studies . 

Aged 22, Cllr Hartigan might be the youngest female councillor in the country, but she is no stranger to politics, having studied it in UL, been an active member of Ógra Fianna Fáil, and interned for Clare TD Cathal Crowe. 

It was during her summer internship with Deputy Crowe that Rachel first considered running in the local elections.  

“I never would have seen myself running for elected politics”, she explained, “but working in Cathal's office, a lot of the queries coming in were what I would imagine a local councillor should really be dealing with. 

“And that's when I realised I didn't know who my local councillor was, which seemed bizarre because I'm a politics student, interning in my TD's office, so I'm politically engaged.  

“And there's a lot that a local councillor deals with that has a huge impact on people's day-to-day lives, and I felt like we were really missing that strong voice.” 

Cllr Hartigan also credits a lack of representation amongst local councillors as a key factor that “spurred” her to action: “I think the median age of a councillor in Ireland is somewhere in the 70s bracket and I felt like that was extremely unfair. 

“When we look at why younger people don't come out in droves to vote a lot of the time, what stood out to me was we can't identify with our politicians. 

“We don't feel like they speak for us and they don't take the time to get to know what our issues are and what's important to us. 

“We're kind of written off and cast aside a lot of the time, and that really spurred me to action as well.” 

Rachel was one of more than 3,600 students to graduate at UL this week, and as a first-time local representative, she said her degree in European Studies has “without a doubt” helped to prepare her for her new role.  

“I could probably go through reams of actual content and papers and academic research that I did, I could give you exact examples that will come into play now in my role, but the main thing is critical thinking. It is the ability to be open minded and have the skills to do your own research, that is the biggest thing. 

“Because there is no guidebook, there is no induction to becoming a councillor, so I'm dealing with queries on housing, medical cards, roads, and footpaths, it's a broad range of issues and I've just started, so having the skills to be able to research properly and effectively and efficiently is huge and I genuinely wouldn't be able to do what I'm doing now had I not learned those really important research skills in UL. 

“Obviously studying politics comes into it but in terms of the other subjects I studied, my time studying marketing was hugely helpful, particularly in planning the campaign. 

“It was massively beneficial to have an understanding of consumer culture and behavior and being able to approach social media strategically, not just throwing something up for the sake of it. And they're all skills and habits that I picked up in my time as a student in UL.” 

Commenting on the landscape for a young woman running an election campaign, Cllr Hartigan said: “I did get a lot of ‘Oh you'll get elected because you're a woman, so you'll get the woman vote or you'll get elected because you're a young person.’ 

“I got elected because I worked my ass off, that's why I got elected.  

“There wasn't an army of young people or an army of women heading to the polling station for me, that's just not what happened, as much as that would have been really cool to see. 

“I got elected because I was canvassing for six or seven hours a day, I was on top of my social media, I was planning and hosting public meetings. 

“I was doing all of the things that you need to do to win, but I was working twice as hard as the average candidate because I had a lot to prove because I am a young woman, so it doesn't make it easier to run as a woman or a young person like some people suggest. 

“You actually have to prove yourself twice as much, and that's not fair, but I think the only way that that will change is if we get more women in and more young people in.” 

Cllr Hartigan credits the support of her family and lecturers in helping her throughout her election campaign.  

“My lecturer Dr Scott Fitzsimmons was very supportive, as was course director Dr Xosé Boan, who advised me to watch myself and my own mental health and well-being as well.  

“Sometimes you get these grand ideas and you're just all go, all the time and you forget to take the time to mind yourself, so I was really glad to have been told that.” 

Rachel does not hail from a political family, with her mother Rosaleen working as a medical secretary and her father Paul the Chief Information Officer for Electric Ireland Superhomes. However, that did not stop Paul from taking on the role of campaign manager.  

“We both learned together and he came out with me every single night, as did my mom. I could not have done it without them,” explained Rachel. 

“Obviously, the focus and the attention is on the candidate, but behind the scenes nobody does it alone, your family has to be on board.  

“It's a huge, massive team effort and for all the work that I was doing with my final year in UL and campaigning, they were out canvassing with me just as much, spending just as many hours at the doors.” 

A native of Parteen, Co. Clare, Rachel attended Parteen National School and now represents the Shannon Electoral Area.  

Reflecting on achieving the two major milestones of graduating university and winning her first election, she said it hasn’t fully sunk in yet. 

“I really felt like I was a campaign/Final Year Project robot, and it’s only the last few weeks I've had time to sit and process and reflect. 

“You never really look at your own accomplishments and achievements and say ‘oh my God, that was really good’. I think Irish people in particular, and women too, are really bad at giving themselves a pat on the back, even when it's well deserved. 

“I'm trying to take in the huge accomplishment, but it's hard to come out and say that and to even feel it, so that's something I'm working on at the moment, giving myself a little pat on the back.”