{"id":1436,"date":"2019-08-07T09:26:11","date_gmt":"2019-08-07T09:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/britopian.com\/?p=1436"},"modified":"2023-11-13T08:10:08","modified_gmt":"2023-11-13T08:10:08","slug":"audience-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.britopian.com\/social-data-analytics\/audience-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Media Audience Research & The Integration of Survey Data"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every marketing campaign needs to start with audience research. Then, it’s time to take out the guesswork and apply some rigor to our marketing and PR work.<\/p>\n

There are several ways to go about conducting audience research. One method is to use social listening tools<\/a>, which can help track mentions of your brand and competitor brands across the internet. This will give you insights into what your customers are saying about your business and what you can do to improve your brand reputation. Another method is to use demographic data from social media platforms themselves. This can help you understand your target audience’s age, gender, and location.<\/p>\n

You can also use more traditional methods like focus groups and surveys.<\/p>\n

Focus groups have always been used for audience research. A focus group is a small, informal group of people who meet to discuss a particular topic. A moderator usually leads the discussion, poses questions, and guides the conversation. Focus groups provide a way to gather insights from various people in a short amount of time. They can be used to explore people’s attitudes and beliefs about a wide range of topics, from healthcare to politics.<\/p>\n

For example, this video was published<\/a> by Vice in 2019. It’s a focus group of liberal Latinos debating conservative Latinos on immigration, Trump, and racial identity. It’s fascinating.<\/p>\n

Additionally, focus groups can help test ad campaigns and product prototypes or understand the pain points of using a product or service. Because they offer a candid and unscripted look at people’s opinions, focus groups can be invaluable for understanding your target audience.<\/p>\n

Primary research or surveys are standard tools used by researchers to collect data from a target audience. They can gather information about opinions, beliefs, preferences, pain points, and behaviors similar to focus groups. Surveys can be conducted in person, by phone, or online using social media.<\/p>\n

When designing a survey, you must decide what data you want to collect. This will determine the questionnaire format and the types of questions asked. Once the survey is designed, it must be pretested to ensure clear, concise, and not too long. After the pretest, the survey can be administered to the target audience using several methods.<\/p>\n

Surveys are an effective way to collect data from a large number of people in a relatively short amount of time. However, they do have some limitations. For example, surveys can be biased if the questions are leading or if the responses are not truly representative of the population. In addition, surveys only provide a snapshot of opinions at a specific time. Despite these limitations, surveys are a widely used approach for audience research.<\/p>\n

While these are all great methods to use in isolation, there is power when you can combine two or more of these methods and dig deeper into audience research.<\/p>\n

Integrating Survey Data With Social Media Audience Research<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Here’s a quick example of using primary and social media audience research to gain insights into a specific customer group, in this case, IT decision-makers.<\/p>\n

An IT decision-maker<\/a> is responsible for making decisions about using technology within an organization. This can include decisions about security, hardware, software, networking, and other IT-related matters.<\/p>\n

In March of 2019, Adobe fielded a study asking IT decision-makers what their top concerns and pain points were for the coming year. (Note: the link to the survey report no longer exists since CMO.com was migrated back to Adobe.com a few years ago).<\/p>\n

One data point that caught my eye was that 57% of the target audience said that data security was a top concern, followed by concerns about implementing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to optimize operations.<\/p>\n

In the real world, it’s a good idea to commission your audience research rather than using someone else’s, but this is all we have. So let’s go.<\/p>\n

To illustrate how a survey, social media audience research, and consumer insights<\/a> can work together.<\/p>\n

We built a social media audience panel of 200K self-identified IT decision-makers a few years ago. We scraped, collected, and curated social media profiles with keywords like CIO, Head of IT, and VP of Engineering in their bios.<\/p>\n

The social media audience research<\/a> data confirms that data security is certainly top of mind for the members of this audience. Below is a breakdown of the data from January 2019 to date.<\/p>\n

The data below is calculated based on the social media mentions of the topics and keywords. It’s important to note that it’s not mutually exclusive either. If members of this audience mention security, AI and IoT, that mention would be counted three times. The data points in the parentheses are mutually exclusive counts.<\/p>\n