Marketplace Insights: Beating The Competition Using Social Media Research
By
Danielle Richardson
The marketplace of the Internet has come a long way since its early days. From the organizing of the web’s content through Google in the late 90s, up to the frontier of social media days, it has grown. The amount of content to sift through was tremendous. It was a nomad’ss land out there before companies like Google and Facebook began to make their marks. Today social media information can be gathered and qualified into intelligent marketplace research.
Organized Social Media Networks
Social media is filled with user generated content from regular people, businesses and large brands. There is so much information being created daily, that to often at times seems impossible to keep up. Data like this can be an invaluable asset in a marketer’s tool set. They’ll be able to make marketing decisions to engage with customers and create new audiences.
No matter what time of the day it is, or where they’re at, people are talking about a lot of topics online. Trending topics have been featured at the top of Facebook, Twitter, and now have forayed with the newcomers like Instagram and Snapchat. These companies are making a lot of money and are the new paradigm for connections in a social media dominated age. You only need to look at the stock price for Facebook where it is well above its IPO pricing, of which more details can be found from Money Morning. This is a new business model for marketers to take implement.
Improved Internal Functions
Many of these social media platforms have a built in search system that is unique to them. They have evolved to be able to show trends unique on the medium that they’re portraying. Using Google as an example of adding order to data, the various social media companies have done so in their respective areas of information.
Let’s take a look at some of these different trends that each respective social media picks up on:
Quantitative Trends From Social Media
Twitter comes to mind when attempting to research what major event or conversation is being had in real time. Twitter is a great way to see what sports, news or entertainment topic of the day is trending. The built-in hashtag system ties this all together. Twitter is a great resource as the most influential and active people in the media landscape and other major industries use it.
Facebook is the largest traditional social network with additional control over Instagram. Conversations and trending topics have a longer lifespan on Facebook due to the medium. Facebook search only allows for public content and items that your friends post. Most public posts come from various businesses, public figures, and major or small businesses. The majority of regular users have their posts private.
Visual Trends
Facebook’s entry with Instagram is a great tool for image based platforms. They’re putting together a picture and visual to the topic. Instagram has revamped itself to be more search friendly and find images that you’re looking for. Hashtags also play another big role in this medium. Pinterest on the other hand is an organized archive that has laid out an intelligent search system in their network.
Snapchat was at first a difficult area for marketers to breach and begin branding. The odd nature of disappearing photos was a strange concept to some at first. That was until features like “Live, Discover, News” became major areas of the application. People are able to post their own stories to a live section and be part of a larger cultural movement. Snapchat filters have become a place for major companies or events to brand themselves directly to the customer. By playing on a fun aspect of it, the marketing is less targeted and seems less intrusive. There is a natural type of play involved with Snapchat marketing.
Breaching The Media
In order to stay successful in the days of social media marketing, you have to know how to tweak your strategy towards different social media platforms. Each has its own respective media of images, text, and video or a mix of all three that can alter a marketing foray into each respective platform.
Danielle Richardson works in market research by day, and is a keen investment trader by night. She enjoys writing articles about the area where she is passionate and knowledgeable, choosing to write for business and marketing as well as investment and finance blogs on her free weekends.
