Last week I read the following article at Adformatie: Unilever marketers are going to chat with consumers via Facebook . In my opinion not really sensational – as a marketer you should always talk to your target group I think – but the article nicely illustrates the underexposed value of Facebook as a market research tool. That's why this week: 4 ways in which you can use Facebook for your market research.
1. Insights
If you have a lively fan page and you really try to interact with your fans, this will generate a lot of data. Data in the form of 'likes', 'shares', reactions and photos. Particularly valuable information is hidden in these reactions. The only question is: 'How do you extract this valuable information from these reactions? Simple: read the reactions regularly, process the important insights and share these with your colleagues. For large amounts of text, text mining can be used , a technique that is often used for research. Now, this will still be quite limited for most fan pages in the Netherlands. A good example of insights that you can extract via the reactions is the posting below on the Facebook page of Chocomel:
There may be a demand for smaller packaging of Chocomel Dark denmark phone number list (product extension) and perhaps a different closure (packaging improvement). Of course, these insights only have value when one of these things occurs more often. The posting is now answered from a customer service perspective (webcare) but of course offers great starting points for the marketing and product managers of Chocomel. Sometimes you can also just openly ask a question to gather the necessary insights. As in the example below:
2. Polls
Facebook offers the standard function to ask a question in the form of a poll. However, most brands use this function purely as a tool for entertainment because their agency tells them it is good to create interactivity. But think one step further. Brands pay a lot of money to market research agencies to present an online survey of 35 questions to a group of consumers who are representative of their target group. On your Facebook page, these people are immediately available! But instead of presenting them with that very long boring questionnaire, you can better divide it into 30 polls, of which you post one every week. Because answering 1 question is easy, people will be more inclined to answer it. As a brand, you also have an additional posting per week for your content planning. Two birds with one stone. Below is an example of John Frieda who uses this functionality to continuously collect insights from their target group:
John Frieda poll on Facebook