Marketing Research Services in the Age of Social Media

Social media has revolutionised marketing research services. It has given re-searchers easy, fast and reliable access to their users and competition.

Of the biggest technological developments that have revolutionised marketing research is the emergence and spread of the social media. What was basically a means for network-ing has become a major business tool. In marketing research it has completely revolutio-nised the way we carry out and evaluate our research.

With its instant connect to millions across the world,

social media is a perfect tool for re-searchers. When it comes to research for companies from countries like Singapore and UK, market research through social media can give us more relevant results. In fact, work-ing with social media has become an essential part of marketing research services.So, how does market research works in the social media era? How has it changed the way market research is carried out?

Forming special interest groups: Social media offered the perfect platform to create a fo-cus group and this gave rise to online market research communities or MROCs. These are online communities that are constituted for basic research purposes. These private invite-only communities can be sustained over long-term, providing relevant groundbreaking ideas.

Big data: The social media is an enormous source of data and not just from MROCs. It can give you an instant glimpse of your users as well as the competitors. This is massive data, from current trends to changing attitudes and perceptions. Then you have the big industry data from blogs by industry experts, news from competitors and latest developments.
Best of all, this data is free of researcher bias and reflective of actual user behaviour. It is constant and fast. Because of this, social media data is actually highly reliable. It is used to understand user behaviour, predict trends, innovations and ideas.

Getting the right language: India is a young country today with its own language. Its up-wardly mobile youth is impatient with an exposure to global news and events. Like their preferences, their language is also changing rapidly. It is important to understand this dis-course because this is the language your users understand and relate to.
Social media has given researchers a unique access to their respondents in a language they understand. From online games to twitter boards, it has forced a whole new language that is snappy and honest.

Crossing barriers: Social media has been instrumental in reaching out across borders. Researchers are creating communities that can be anywhere in the world and monitoring them constantly. For clients from countries like UK and Singapore setting up shop in India, social media also allowed them to see the process for themselves.

Quick and cheap: Undoubtedly the biggest benefit of social media is that it is quick and cheap. Setting up online communities and monitoring these is relatively cheaper. There are also a number of free tools that researchers regularly employ. But, best of all, it gives us an almost instant responses. As a result, researchers are now creating surveys in al-most record time span. For instance, reactions to a product launch can be accessed within 24 hours by studying social media chatter.

Validating traditional research: Despite its many benefits, social media is usually used by researchers to validate the findings from their traditional research. They use MROCs to verify results from other qualitative or quantitative studies. Do the social media groups re-flect quantitative data? Active social media chatter and feedback is often more believable for the client.

Combining quantitative with qualitative: Social media gives marketing research services the unique opportunity to combine both qualitative and quantitative research. It gives us an easy access to numbers through web traffic, which forms the quantitative content. Web chatter, on the other hand, gives us the qualitative data. So, we now have an important tool that can give us a composite data of users —their demographic, motivations and behaviour.

Monitoring of analytics: Web tools can tell us exactly which tool is the most effective! For instance, researchers use various tools like Google analytics to monitor the traffic to their website. Where is it coming from? Which social media website directs most of the traffic to yours? If it is Facebook, you can shift your research and marketing to that platform.

Social media has dramatically changed marketing research services. It has made it quick-er, easily verifiable and cheaper.

Source - http://www.apsense.com/article/marketing-research-services-in-the-age-of-social-media.html