Social Strategy Research

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Conducting social media research

Before developing a social media strategy, it's important to conduct research to learn as much relevant information as possible. Who are your target audience? What social media channels are they active on? What types of content are most effective on those channels? What enhanced features do those channels offer? What types of content does your audience engage with? What time of day proves most effective for posting content? How do your competitors use these social media channels? To answer these and similar questions, you must do your research!

Types of research

Research can take many forms. 

Owned research

It could be owned research, which is research that your company has already carried out. 

This could be data from previous social media campaigns. Or it could be white papers and other analyses that you have published. 

Desk research

The research could be desk research. Indeed, this is what most people think of when they think about research. This basically involves sitting at your desk and going online, reading books, analyzing reports, studying graphs, and so on. Unlike owned research, this is third-party information that could guide your own social media strategy. 

Audience research

Another very important type of research is audience research. As with all marketing, when deploying social media marketing, it’s important to understand your target audience. Who are they? What segments can they be divided into? What products or services are they interested in? What’s their budget? And crucially, in the context of your social strategy, what social media channels are they active on? By answering these questions, you’ll be able to develop audience personas and create social media content that will appeal to these personas.  

In this example, you can see the types of information you might want to look at when researching your audience.

The core segment differentiators provide us with geo-demographic information. These types of variables are mirrored on all social channels and are likely to be a key component of any internal CRM database.

Most businesses will also use purchasing and website behavior to learn more about their important audiences. Additional information can also be gleaned by examining customer feedback and conducting offline research.

Social media allows us to add contextual and emotional information to our segment understanding. In real time we can see what our audience cares about, how they feel, and what type of content is most likely to generate conversation and sharing.

Competitor research

As well as understanding your audience, you need to understand your competitors. So when developing your own social strategy, be sure to research your competitors’ social strategies also. What types of content do they post? How often do they post?

What did of engagement do they get? Can you see any correlation between their social media activity and their overall business performance? While you should avoid mimicking a competitor’s social strategy, competitor research should give you a good sense of what works well in your market.

Social media research

You can also use social media itself to do research for your social strategy. For example, you could use social media to recruit people to research. Or you could post polls and questionnaires to gather data about your followers. You might also use audience listening to identify trends among your followers, such as recurring issues that concern them, general audience sentiment towards your brand, and the times they are most active on social media.  

For example, a tool like Talkwalker helps you understand what is important to your audience. This social listening tool combines data from multiple data sources and can provide some very useful insights.

For example, this chart shows an output from Talkwalker visualizing the areas of interest that airline customers are most concerned about.

Using this information, you could dig further to see which channels were used for these conversations.

For example, if food and drinks were discussed most on Instagram, you might increase the amount of content promoting the quality and range of your airline’s food and drink offering on that channel.

Organizing your research

Having conducted your research, you need to collate it. As with any data, your next step is to analyze the information and develop insights. This involves identifying key trends and patterns in order to discover the biggest opportunities and routes to take with your audience. Then not only do you know what the research says – you know what it means.

Having gathered your insights, write a brief that details every piece of information gathered to date. This brief can guide you as you start to build your strategy. 

The brief should highlight the research insights that will drive your strategy. For example, the brief might inform which elements you should specifically focus on in your strategy. If you know that videos generate high levels of engagement among your followers, then you know that video development needs to be an important part of your strategy.

When structuring the brief, you could organize the insights along the phases of strategy development: planning; setting objectives; conducting research; building and executing the strategy; and measuring strategy performance. 

Although the data should be thorough, you might want to summarize the key research insights into a concise document (such as a playbook). This resource could then become as a how-to guide for operating social media channels, making it easier for you to build a strategy.