Social media is increasingly used by organisations to discover more about their audience and the market. Doing so has reduced effort, time and money as compared to older methods of discovering information about audiences. This is so as there is a wide variety of information online as people make purchases, express views, do networking and more on social media.
Businesses with the right strategies and tools are able to take advantage of this opportunity to examine the needs of users and cater their businesses to them. Consequently, social media marketing in Singapore is one of the key areas that companies are investing their time and resources to further their business goals. Below are some strategies highlighted to better use social media to obtain information about customers.
1) Select Your Goals
Before finding out something, you must first outline what exactly you are trying to investigate. This can include a whole range of information ranging from product research, awareness of brand, consumer behaviour, and more. Any information relating to that can either be quantitative in nature – involving numbers, or qualitative in nature – involving ideas, opinions, feelings and more about a given situation or thing. For example, an organisation might find out 800 mentions of itself on a search engine, and those mentions can involve positive or negative mentions to the organisation.
2) Select a Platform
Once the above is done, the marketer can target information on a given social media. Some social media platforms might hold certain valuable information, depending on the goal. For example, Facebook has a very wide platform of information including pictures, statuses, repost of news articles, events, and more. However, other social media sites like Instagram and Snapchat are narrower as they mainly portray images and captions. Certain social media platforms have different demographics of users with Instagram and Snapchat capturing younger audiences.
3) Select the Right Tools
Different tools have different functions including monitoring comments about an organisation, finding out your competitors’ online presence, seeing which content is being viewed the most, and more. Such tools can enlighten organisations of consumer behaviour and patterns of viewing. Thus, you must be sure what you are looking for and then look at what different tools and services provide.
4) Using the collected information
Information gathered can either be used for marketing, pursuing a business goal, providing a new service, providing a new product, and more. Action must be taken once information is acquired to increase their ROI. For example, via social media platforms, an organisation might learn that certain features of a product or service are causing inconvenience to customers. To ensure that their brand is reliable, they would mitigate the issues mentioned and further the trust of customers. Consequently, the products and services are constantly refined as customers give feedback and improvements are made following that.
Therefore, social media allows for companies to collect information about customers as well as feedback from them, unlike traditional methods like surveys which can incur much cost and time. Additionally, large amount of information can be gotten and general patterns can be analysed given the immediacy and accessibility of information. At times, such technical tasks calls for companies to work closely with a digital marketing agency in Singapore who have the professional expertise to assist in collecting and making use of such information.
