Social media generates data every single second of every day. It’s overwhelming to even think about using this data to predict a trend in a landscape where it feels like as soon as you have a handle on one trend, we’re onto the next!
With an increasing number of competitors in the market, you need to have a deep understanding of social media data to know how each competitor threatens your business, how social media impacts your customers’ behaviors and how they engage with your product/service as a whole.
In this Adweek webinar, Netbase Quid offered some advice on leveraging social media data to predict consumer trends.
- Identify the critical conversation drivers in your market (social listening tools will become your best friend for this)
- Gain a deeper understanding of consumer sentiments toward your brand and the market as a whole
Let’s say you launched a low alcohol beverage. You might want to find out what people are saying about Dry January, hangovers, and reviews of your competitors. Once you identify those key topics, you have to start tracking them manually or through an alert to see how they’re doing. If you begin to see a trend climb, that’s when you can prepare to insert yourself into peak conversation.
It’s also essential to break down these trends by demographics. So if your hypothetical beverage is popular with young women, that’s an excellent place to start with focus groups and marketing campaigns. Why isn’t your product popular with men or older women? How do you reach young women? Do you have another product they might like?
Questions like this will help you determine what’s driving the conversation about your brand, product/service and market. Social media data is extraordinary in that it’s both free and easily accessible. It’s easy to capture yet can be turned into such valuable insights.
You can leverage these insights to persuade your company to increase its budget for researching consumer trends on social media. After all, people will never stop talking on social media, so why don’t you listen?