Mining Social Media to Discover What Your Customers Really Want

Most marketers think of social media primarily as a medium for targeted messaging and interaction, but it can also play a powerful role in helping you get to know your customers. Think about it: every day, people log on to social networks and discuss brands in a way that is 100% open and accessible. Not only can we see what they’re saying, but thanks to the many great analytics tools currently on the market, we can conduct high level sentiment and content analysis on those conversations at the click of a button.

Want to learn how to go about mining social media for valuable consumer insights? Here are a few tips:

• Start with listening. Before you get into aggregating data and sentiment analysis, make a real commitment to the simple act of listening to what people are saying about your brand in real time. Doing this can be as easy as signing up for Hootsuite (one of our favorite free social media tools) and setting up a stream that picks up any tweet that mentions a related keyword (usually your brand name).

• Analyze emotions. Marketers who are new to mining social for insights often start with sentiment analysis. Many popular social media tools make it easy to see whether the tide of conversation about your brand is turning positive, negative our neutral at any given time. Shifts from one end of the spectrum to another could be an early indication of an event or occurrence that needs your attention. We especially like Sprout Social’s sentiment analysis tool for an easy, at-a-glance look at the mood of conversation.

• Use a text mining tool. For those who are ready to take social media analysis to the next level, text mining can be a powerful tool. Most text mining programs are built around a programing language called R, which uses complex algorithms to extract trends from huge amounts of text-based data. Thankfully, you don’t have to know R (or have any programming skills at all) to get started with text mining. User friendly, opens source tools like Rapidminer make it a possibility for all of us.

Are you leveraging social media for its potential to help you figure out what your customers really want?

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