Need to collect data with social media? Here’s how

Social media is growing and evolving at the speed of light with no sign of stopping anytime soon. If you are already busy with a social media marketing strategy or you are looking for other ways to get the best out of your campaign, consider the collection of data that can enhance your overall campaign completely.

Social gives you the ability to get feedback quickly that will help you and your campaign stay agile. Find a couple of ways you can use the data you collect in your campaign to enhance your strategy.

Collect feedback

When rolling out a new service or updating features of any of your existing services or products, it’s common to find a couple of upset customers not used to your changes. It happens. It’s business and life has to go on. When Facebook rolls out new changes, many people complain about it, but after a while they can’t figure out how they used Facebook without the updates. This doesn’t mean every update and change will go smoothly in your business, sometimes there are legitimate design and user experience issues that you can’t figure out on your own and your customers will point it out for you.

Good practice is to probe your target audience or customers first before launching a new product or updating an existing one to gather feedback from them. The nice thing about social media is that when you communicate to your target audience, the chances are that other people will also see it and engage with you. Getting a range of feedback on new services or products — whether they are worth developing and easy to use — will help you keep your ear to the group and gather all the data to make sure if it’s really worth your time and effort creating or updating a new product.

Focus groups

With social media there are a range of methods you can use for research and development. One method is to use focus groups to start segmenting your audience. For example, use a LinkedIn group to segment people by industry or location so that you can better target your questions. You can also use a focused Twitter chat to find the answers on user-generated suggestions. These are easy to set up and only require a bit of planning on what you want to achieve with your focus groups.

With a focus group you can gather specific feedback from an audience that fits specific information. There are many ways to get your target audience involved in building up your brand while gathering feedback that will help you reach your business objectives.

Client surveys

Ask people in your network online to share their experiences using your business through a survey. An easy way to get started with this is to create an online survey and then tweet a link to the survey with a unique hashtag. This way you can get instant feedback from your audience. This doesn’t mean you will automatically receive feedback the moment you launch your survey. Announce the survey in all of the channels you are using or set up a survey targeting a specific audience to gather feedback.

With surveys you can gain feedback that can help you improve your service and product offerings. Find new ways of integrating surveys into all of the marketing channels that you are currently using.

One reason you are using social media for marketing purposes is to strengthen and expand your network. With this, take advantage to find answers directly on social media. Do you need an SEO copywriter? Skip Google and ask your network directly if they know of someone who can help you. Not only will you get good answers, but you will also meet someone new that can be added to your network.

Analyse different personas

With any inbound marketing strategy, developing personas is a critical part of your marketing campaign. Instead of analysing and starting from nothing, ask your network online a couple of questions that will help you narrow down your audience and to create different personas. Ask about demographic information, issue points, what they find valuable in similar services or products that you are offering, and even what they do in their free time.

If you have already created different personas but would like to refine them, ask for responses from your network that meets specific information. For example, you might tweet “If you are into soccer, do you buy any soccer related merchandise or magazines about this sport?” As with focus groups, you can target specific people with your questions.

Online monitoring

There are many articles, books, and blog posts online about social media monitoring and how you should monitor your social media mentions. While this is true, you can also monitor your competitors and target audience. By monitoring mentions about your direct competition, you can focus on people who are currently unhappy with other brands in your industry. Learn why they are unhappy and find ways how you can provide a better solution for them. Learn how you can be different and unique.