When you are an entrepreneur or a small business owner, you may not yet have a budget to do market research on your product or service, to know what your competitors are doing and how consumers behave towards these brands, which is important that you must know to know what differentiating element you will introduce in your product or service that produces customer satisfaction.
However, the fact that you do not have the budget to hire a consulting company or specialized in market research, does not prevent you from doing your own research yourself.
And how can you do it? making use of social networks.
Indeed, social networks such as Twitter and Facebook constitute an important source of data on consumer behaviors and even allow you to know the strategy used by your competitors to capture the attention of your audience and achieve customer satisfaction, in addition to Facebook. You can get super valuable information regarding market segmentation, which is the key to getting the right message across to your consumers.
But assuming that you have your market well defined and segmented, that is, you know who you are going to target your product or service, it is convenient that you know how you can carry out your market research on the main social networks: Twitter and Facebook.
Now, it is important that you know that although it is an option that will not cost you money, since social networks are public and available to everyone on the web, this requires time and that you are constantly monitoring, however, well It is worth investing that time so that you can make a correct strategic planning.
Having said that, here are some tips that may be useful:
Market research on Twitter:
On Twitter you can see the tweets of the brands and above all you can see the reactions of the followers towards the content they generate.
We suggest you make a private list with all your competitors present, if you cannot locate them by name, you can use the Twitter search engine and do a search; If you still can't get them, you can go directly to their website and start following them if they have the Twitter icon.
Once you've gotten your competitors, you can start studying their tweets and dig into the strategy they're using: promotions, discounts, customer service, community, content generation, or brand building.
On the other hand, if you study carefully the account of your closest competitor, you will be able to know who or who are the most loyal customers and the influencers of the community.
After you identify the most loyal followers, you can get more information and feedback that they are giving to the brand directly. By closely monitoring it, you can detect the sentiment of its followers. Do they praise or complain? Generally, people who take the time to leave feedback about something also offer a recommendation on how to improve it. If they are talking about service, you can find out where they fail and how you can make it more efficient. If they talk about products, you will be able to know which are the categories that are selling the most and those that are not so much. If, instead, they are congratulating the brand, you will be able to detect the areas of opportunity for your company.
Market research on Facebook:
In this social network you can also get a lot of information about your competitors. However, you should be aware that Facebook is much more static than Twitter.
To locate your competitors, do a search for their Fan Page or, just like on Twitter, simply go to the portal of the company you are interested in investigating.
Once you become a fan of them, you will know if they are using Facebook to generate sales opportunities through the collection of emails, adding information from other social networks, motivating their consumers to participate in the conversation with comments or using Applications.
Also, it is important that you find out the interaction of your competitors with their fans. This interaction can come in the form of discounts, offers, promotions, exclusive products for them, articles, relevant information, videos, photos, funny videos, among others.
On fan pages you have the option to add other fan pages as favorites. Using this section, you have the opportunity to see which businesses are related to your competition. It is a way to research more about the business partners of other competitors and also a way to get more leads that could generate sales for you.
You see that it is not so complicated to do market research on social networks and that these have become a very important tool when it comes to defining tastes, interests and needs, in addition to knowing what your competitors are doing and what works or what fails. Knowing this, you can implement very creative ideas that differentiate your brand from others, which is what you want to achieve in the long run.
