Facebook and Instagram are the two most popular social channels. By focusing customer research efforts on these two platforms, you are saving time and resources because these are the spaces everyone is already in and where they are most willing to provide feedback.
Social media based customer research is the best way to get necessary insights
Social media has become an integral part of our everyday life. It has transformed the way we interact with people and data. It provides us an easy and convenient way to stay connected to our friends and engage with the world without meeting face-to-face. This online space provides many opportunities for companies and individuals to communicate directly and quickly with the audience, promote research awareness, and improve engagement with the audience.
Can Researchers Benefit from Facebook & Instagram As Well?
Absolutely, if done right, researchers benefit from the massive reach of social media.
Research suggests that platforms like Facebook and Instagram are suitable channels to promote awareness and increase engagement with a massive audience who actually have an interest in assisting in your research.
Platforms like Facebook and Instagram lets you cast the line exactly where it is needed.
As of January 2020, out of the 7.8 billion people across the world, 3.397 billion are active social media users. Not just that, almost one million new users are added to social media every day. This means a new user is added every 10 seconds. This massive ocean of highly active audiences gives you access to fresh participants and a view of your real consumers.
There are nearly 900 million Facebook users around the world and in a day, users spend around 50 minutes reading, watching, sharing, reacting, and posting on Facebook. A study by Stanford professor Michal Kosinski revealed that a computer model based on Facebook “likes” knew more about its subjects than one’s friends and colleagues.
And likes are just one of the various data points collected on users. These user attributes help researchers target the audiences precisely. The capability to collect user attributes forms the core of Facebook’s business model. Standard demographics like age, location, gender, interest, and even employment and educational information is included in these attributes. When combined with a powerful market research platform, this targeting capability is highly valuable.
Along with the largest collection of socio-demographic information, Facebook offers numerous ways to conduct market research and analyse trends. By integrating the platforms’ incomparable insights with an innovative tool like Bolt Insight, users can quickly create and launch surveys. The powerful reach of Facebook allows you to find respondents quickly and collect answers, while with Bolt you can make your surveys go viral in just a few clicks.
Instagram has over 25 million active monthly users and nearly 40 million photos are uploaded on the platform every day. This point makes Instagram different from other social media platforms in that it follows a visual-based strategy for engagement. Pictures capture the attention of consumers and in turn, provides an excellent method to encourage relationships with a particular brand. This visual and simple way of engagement particularly attracts the younger generation. Today, Instagram has become the most powerful social media channel for businesses as well.
Instagram is a youth-focused social network and to make your marketing efforts work here, you need a deeper understanding of the audience first. All of this said if you want to build a customer research strategy that resonates with your audience you need to understand how the Instagram algorithm works.
Instagram is increasing in popularity day by day and continues to update algorithms constantly to enhance user experience. Hence, it becomes difficult to optimise your content to get the most engagement and reach.
Benefits of Using Facebook and Instagram for Consumer Research
- Find Your Target Audience: This is one of the biggest advantages of Facebook and Instagram that they ace at providing you insights about your consumer base and what products and/or services tend to attract your customers the most. This attribute is especially useful for small businesses and startups who have yet to identify their target customers.
- Consumer Insights: These platforms offer numerous ways to gather real-time consumer insights to analyse market trends. Bolt Insight effectively uses these insights to place hyper-targeted ads to the news feed of users whose behaviours closely match the project requirement.
- Customer Engagement: When it comes to engagement, Facebook and Instagram offer you opportunities to engage with the consumers on a personal level. Most people use these platforms during their free time. This fact increases the chance of active engagement as users are more likely to open a survey invitation and respond to the questions more aptly. With Bolt’s innovative approach, you can create interactive surveys that boost user engagement by grabbing user attention.
- Improved Cost Efficiency: Facebook and Instagram are equipped with free tools to gather insights and derive useful information. If you compare it to traditional survey methods, the price difference is staggering. Apart from cost, effective user engagement is also beneficial for brand and network building, advertising, lead generation, and various other improvements.
Alternative social media channels might also be great places to conduct research. For example, LinkedIn allows you to connect on a professional level with numerous experts in the field, and Twitter being used by many celebrities and leading companies intensifies the chances of a post going viral. Thus, social networks have huge potential and behavioural targeting is central to getting the most out of conducting customer research on social media.
Bolt Insight for Customer Research
From real-time access to information and reduced cost to the ability to unleash hidden trends, social media offers powerful ways to maximize your market research and build your business. Using social media channels like Facebook and Instagram, you can quickly find fresh respondents to collect answers. With Bolt innovative research platform you can utilise the built-in search features of these social channels and conduct research as easily as signing up for social media services like Facebook and Instagram. In a few clicks, you can set up a market survey and start analysing trends to transform your strategies and achieve your business goals.
