Meta vs Twitter: How to Use Social Media for Market Research

Meta and Twitter are the two prominent players in the realm of social media that have redefined the digital landscape and changed the way people build connections and communicate information. While both social media platforms serve as effective tools for communication and information dissemination, each platform has different features that cater to different customer’s needs and purposes.

Marketers do market research to understand their customers’ needs and unveil new business opportunities, from time to time. However, the traditional way of market research is no longer applicable after consumer preferences and market dynamics have changed over time. Though annual surveys and focus groups are still meaningful touchpoints, they give little information about trending topics amongst customers and current events. Social media platforms are flooded with these in-the-moment insights and that is the reason why 90% of leaders anticipate that their company’s success will depend on how effectively they utilize social media insights and data to inform business strategy.

Around 80% of business leaders believe that their company’s social media budget will eventually increase in the next 3 three years, and amongst them, more than 2 in 5 (approx. 44%) estimate that their budget will increase by more than 50%. 

Marketers need to do thorough market research on social media to unveil a critical customer base, and industry insights to keep an eye on an accurate pulse on the market besides keeping the costs low.

Meta vs Twitter: Different purposes and different audiences

Meta and Twitter are two different entities in social media, each with different sets of features and purposes. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is a group that includes several social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and others. It focuses on a good range of features that include personal profiles, messaging, multimedia sharing, groups, and pages. Meta’s primary objective is to establish a comprehensive ecosystem for online communication, commerce, and entertainment. Meta is expanding its aim to incorporate virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. The number of active Instagram users in India is 516.92 million, this platform has grown into a source of income for digital content creators and a promising sales channel for businesses.

On the other hand, Twitter functions independently as a microblogging platform, allowing users to write and publish their thoughts, and opinions. Users publish and engage with brief messages, popularly called “tweets” on a global scale. It is a go-to platform for trending topics, public conversations, and real-time information sharing other than being a prominent platform for news dissemination, social activism, and public discussions. It encourages rapid dissemination of information and engages with a diverse range of users, including public figures, organizations, and communities.

Whereas Meta focuses on building personal connections and fostering a sense of community through a diverse range of multimedia content. Twitter thrives on up-to-the-minute information and facilitates public conversations in a concise format. In the end, the choice of choosing between the two depends on the specific target audience, specific communication goals, and content preferences of the businesses or users. 

Both social media platforms have unique advantages that serve different communication needs and purposes, making them valuable tools for businesses, individuals, and organizations to build a connection between their audiences and effectively engage in different forms of communication and information dissemination. Understanding distinctive features and dynamics of Meta and Twitter can prove to be beneficial in making informed decisions about which platform aligns well with their type of communication and engagement objectives. As per the market research expert, India has the largest number of Facebook users with 448.1 million users, this represents approximately 31.8% of the population of the country. 

Let’s understand social media market research and its importance. 

Social media market research involves collecting historical and real-time data from various social media channels to improve your business. It offers you critical insights from qualitative data such as comments and posts and quantitative metrics like shares and likes. While social media research has proved to be cost-effective, quick, and comprehensive, with over 4.76 billion social media users in 2023, collect vast and diverse social listening data to analyze conversations and fetch accurate insights about your brand and the industry.

Social media market research is the tool that enables us to fetch data to transform the business by making your business more customer-centric, helping you manage brand reputation, keeping you ahead of competitors, predicting future trends, filling market gaps, and optimizing your business with minimum spend.

How to Use Social Media for Market Research?

Social media is no less than a goldmine for businesses seeking insights into their target audience. Making social media insights an integral part of business strategy has emerged as a powerful tool for understanding trends and consumer behavior. Social listening data is undoubtedly a valuable and effective source of market intelligence. However, with all kinds of raw data in hand, it becomes challenging to sniff the accurate data. Effective business strategies can impact your business and its future.

Let’s explore numerous strategies and techniques to effectively leverage social media for market research.

1. Recognize your prime objective: Ensuring that your research and efforts align with your business goals helps you bring focus and clarity. This further helps determine which social media platforms are relevant and what kind of data needs to be collected to make informed decisions. It aids in creating targeted marketing campaigns and developing products or services that serve the preferences and needs of the relevant audience.
   
   
2. Choosing the right social media platform: Different social media platforms have different purposes and audiences that attract different demographics. Identifying an appropriate social media platform becomes highly important besides analyzing where your target audience can engage with your business effectively and are most active. This is one of the most crucial steps to ensure that your research efforts fetch relevant data. Facebook is the most used social media platform in the world, with 2.9 million monthly active users.
   
   
3. Keeping an eye on the latest trends and conversations: To get your business up and running, actively monitoring the trending conversations, discussions, and trending topics related to the business will help you yield fruitful results. The usage of hashtags, and relevant influencers, and analyzing the conversations will help you with insights into consumer opinions and emerging trends.
   
   
4. Understand Audience Demographics: Social media tools offer insights into audience demographics, and analyze the age group, gender, location, and interest of your target audience. Social media platforms have in-depth analytics tools that offer insights into the preferences of your audience. These social media tools can help you tailor your marketing strategies that effectively resonate with your audience. As of the year 2023, an estimated 4.9 billion people use social media across the world and the number is expected to touch 5.85 billion by the year 2027.
   
   
5. Utilizing social media analytics tools and monitoring competitors: Track and utilize social media analytics tools to trace key metrics like click-through rates, engagement rates, and conversion rates. Analyze these metrics to understand the impact of your marketing campaigns and strategies. Keep an eye on your competitors, their social media activities and engagements, and consumer feedback to stay ahead of time. This strategy will help you provide a competitive edge by identifying gaps in the market that can be capitalized on.
   
   
6. Surveys and Polls: Make surveys and polls an inherent part of your business function. Involve yourself in creating engaging and concise surveys to collect specific information and feedback from your audience. This will help provide you with in-depth information about their preferences, needs, and pain points.

Conclusion

Market trends and consumer preferences are continuously evolving, and adapting to your social media market research strategies to stay ahead of the curve becomes essential to grow your business. One of the major factors, using the data gathered from social media research to create a detailed buyer persona is required to tailor your marketing strategies to meet the needs of your target audience. By effectively harnessing the effectiveness of social media for market research, businesses gain a powerful momentum to make the right decisions that ultimately drive business growth and success.