Social media listening is a fundamental process in market research, but there is still a lot of confusion about it.
If you run a business, you know how important social networks-and especially what people express on social networks-are in order to make progress and maintain a high reputation.
Perhaps, however, you do not know how the quantitative and qualitative analysis steps in social media listening take place or what, specifically, this process is!
This is perfectly normal, because social listening is a system recently introduced in the best market research.
In addition, it is necessary to know how to query effective social media listening tools and software in order to get consistent and truly useful information for your business.
Today we want to clarify your thoughts about social listening and qualitative and quantitative data analysis.
Remember that you can contact us at any time to get more information about our market analysis and what we can do for you!
Social media listening: definition and basic information about it.
Social media listening, which we can literally translate as “social media listening,” is the process of analyzing and evaluating what is being said about a company, product or brand on the Internet, particularly on social channels.
During our market surveys, listening to social media provides us with a great deal of information regarding your company, your target customers, and competing companies (if the survey includescompetitor analysis).
Are you wondering why it is so important to analyze and monitor social?
There are many reasons for this but, primarily, social media listening allows us to help you optimize your social strategies, organize new and better ones, and outperform your competitors .
In fact, with this process we can:
- Understand which social channels are preferred by your target customers and therefore where it would be best for your company to express itself
- Find out which influencers are most highly rated by your clientele
- Understand how you should express yourself to your current and potential customers
- Analyze how your competitors are doing on social (and understand why they are making their moves)
- Keeping track of your brand’s growth on social media
- Understand what target customers think about your company and client companies
- Find out which products reference customers like most, which they don’t like, and why
And much more.
The result of social media listening carried out with awareness by amarket research agency is the growth of your company, the improvement of your reputation and the trust that consumers place on your brand… And, of course, the acquisition of new customers.
But how does this process take place and how are its quantitative and qualitative analysis steps?
First of all, we would like to point out that putting together a survey based on social media listening requires in-depth preparation consisting of years and years of study, adequate experience, and a great ability to use the appropriate tools (social listening tools and software).
We advise against DIY, because the results may be approximate, erroneous and lead you down the wrong path.
What is a fundamental process for your business could prove most damaging if it is not conducted in the manner best suited to the case.
That said, doing social media listening means interrogating tools and software with complicated algorithms in order to derive and analyze a large amount of data useful to the company’s goals.
For example, we can intercept data about:
- your own brand (including products),
- market trends,
- your competitors,
- Your customers and their opinions/preferences/behaviors
Next, we analyze Big Data and sift through it as best we can to get answers to precise marketing questions, which vary for each individual company.
As you probably know, our market analyses are divided into the qualitative and quantitative phases.
The quantitative analysis phase during social media listening consists of collecting a large amount of public data in order to obtain extremely accurate and useful reports for our client companies.
This data is information left behind by target customers and competing companies on social media, including Twitter.
These are spontaneous words and information, expressions of customers’ feelings and preferences but also projections of competitors’ strategies.
Quantitative analysis is directly and necessarily related to the qualitative analysis stage.
This second phase consists of studying the motivations that lead the target customers and competitors (if the work involvescompetitive analysis) to act in a certain way.
During the quantitative analysis we acquire a large amount of information, and investigate the “what,” while during the subsequent qualitative analysis we analyze this data in order to find the “why” of the information itself.
This approach allows us to get extremely precise answers to our clients’ marketing questions.
We can find out why customers like one product over another, why they consider your company or competing companies more, why they choose to communicate in a certain way, and much more information.
Read also: How to do market research with Google Trends (but beware of DIY!).
In conclusion
While reading this article, you learned what social listening is, why it is critical for your business, and what its quantitative and qualitative analysis steps are.
Want more information about our method?
Feel free tocontact us for a free initial consultation. We look forward to hearing what we can do for your brand!
