8 Best Ways: How to Boost Organic Posts for Maximum Engagement
By Brandwatch TeamJan 31
Social media market research has become a game-changer for brands in an era defined by constant connectivity.
On average, we spend more than 90 minutes each day on social media. It’s become the easiest place for brands to connect with their desired audience quickly.
With platforms like TikTok and Instagram hosting billions of social media users worldwide, conducting market research on these sites offers opportunities for social media managers, small business owners, and enterprise teams to gain insights and refine their strategies.
Using social media in market research covers everything from gathering real-time feedback to doing in-depth social listening and sentiment analysis.
In this blog, we'll discuss the value of market research on social media, highlight the best ways to collect and analyze data, and show you how Brandwatch’s comprehensive suite of solutions can assist you in creating a robust media market research plan.
By the end, you’ll have a clear roadmap for informed decisions that reflect consumer interests, emerging trends, and the changing preferences that shape modern commerce.
In this guide:
Benefits of using social media for market research
When properly applied, social media market research can help marketers get an accurate picture of their target audience’s needs. It's also great for finding trending topics and responding quickly to current events.
In contrast to traditional research methods like phone interviews and in-person focus groups, it doesn't require extensive time and resources.
Speed and efficiency
Whether you’re monitoring competitor hashtags or engaging directly with customer comments, social channels provide the immediacy and scale that’s difficult to replicate with older, offline techniques.
Gathering social data can happen overnight, allowing you to respond to customer feedback or brand reputation concerns in days or even hours. By contrast, a lengthy offline study could take months to collect and analyze.
Cost-effectiveness
Tools for social media market research are often more affordable than large-scale traditional methods. So long as you have some social media monitoring tools, you're good to go.
You could even get clever with various features available across social media platforms and use them for market research, for example, running basic focus groups via free polling features or direct outreach to your followers.
In this example, Microsoft ran an X poll, gathering insights about Microsoft 365 Copilot in Excel.
Loading Twitter Post...
Data-driven decisions
You can bolster your market research approach with firsthand consumer statements by analyzing raw data from things like user comments, private group discussions, or brand tags. This is great for elevating your informed decisions and your overall business strategy.
Sifting through social data can also reveal how your products are being received and whether your followers are staying loyal to your brand.
That’s why techniques like natural language processing are increasingly popular in social media market research. By identifying keywords and clustering topics with tools like word clouds, marketers can detect the tone, emotion, and frequency behind any mention or conversation.
Relevance to current events
Social media thrives on what’s happening "now." Whether there’s a global trend, a cultural phenomenon, or a niche community buzz, using social media for market research will help you stay ahead of the curve. You'll be more likely to spot emerging trends, and this means that you can be proactive in your approach to content, rather than reactive.
Customer-centric approach
Engaging your target audience on platforms they already use is a good way to gather genuine feedback.
If you're using social media for market research, the results will likely feel unsolicited, authentic, and often more candid. And if you need to, you can refine your approach based on how your audience responds.
Key market research methods on social media
There are a few tried-and-tested strategies for conducting market research across social media platforms. They might not all apply to your business, but it’s worth knowing the techniques out there if you need them.
1. Social listening for actionable insights
Social listening is monitoring social channels for direct mentions of your brand, competitor brands, customer review sites, and broader trending conversations in your industry.
Unlike passive observation, social listening involves analyzing tone, frequency, sentiment, and context. This process reveals customer sentiment, so you quickly understand how people actually feel about your brand or product at a granular level. This can give much more reliable and authentic feedback than those post-purchase surveys that drop into our email inboxes.
Beyond that, you can use audience segmentation to identify the distinct groups talking about your brand. This will allow you to tailor messages based on location, age, language, or purchase behavior.
What’s more, social listening is good for spotting issues with brand reputation in real time. If you're on top of this, you can respond to potential crises before they escalate. By getting into the habit of addressing specific pain points as they arise, you can boost brand loyalty and better understand consumer preferences.
2. Competitor intelligence
Competitor analysis is vital for any organization looking to grow.
When you conduct media market research across social media platforms, you can uncover how competing brands engage their followers, which marketing campaigns are getting more attention, and how often they’re talked about in industry conversations.
This type of competitor intelligence has loads of benefits. You can use it to spot gaps in the market and potential services your brand could offer, as well as to get a feel for strengths and weaknesses in competitor offerings.
If you look closely, you might even see how other companies handle data privacy concerns or customer queries.
Armed with these findings, you can create products that no one else is offering, and figure out how to market them in ways that people will love.
3. Surveys and focus groups on social media
While focus groups and online social surveys might feel old-school, blending them with social media data is possible.
For example, if you're still using more formal, offline market research methods, you could combine these with Facebook Polls, LinkedIn surveys, and interactive Instagram Stories.
When doing so, a good way to gather quantitative data quickly is by asking multiple-choice or rating-scale questions.
For qualitative data, you could suggest that social media users leave a comment instead, giving you customer feedback in the customers’ own words.
Both methods will give you immediate user-generated content you can analyze for patterns and themes.
To take it one step further, you could even blend your social poll results with ongoing social listening to get some holistic data about how your audience interacts with your brand over time.
4. Data analytics and natural language processing
Thanks to the evolution of data analytics and natural language processing, it's possible to dive deeper than ever into unstructured text and visuals.
This powerful combination can reveal the nuance behind online chatter. It means counting how many times your brand is mentioned, capturing the emotion behind each mention, and determining the broad topics that keep surfacing.
You've got two methods to choose from here – text analytics and visual analytics.
Text analytics is all about examining customer comments, product reviews, and share-of-voice metrics, then categorizing these mentions into positive, negative, or neutral to form a clear customer sentiment index.
Visual analytics, on the other hand, uses advanced tools to identify your brand’s logo in user images, video content, and memes. This approach extends beyond text-based research to uncover brand presence in less obvious contexts.
These technologies can give you a pretty comprehensive view of who’s talking about your brand, how frequently, and in what context – all in real time. They can also give some insight into trending topics or pick up on suggestions for new features so your research and development or marketing teams know where to focus next.
In this example, Brandwatch’s Image Insights detected the Red Bull logo in a viral race day moment, showing how the brand appeared in social media conversations.
Overcoming challenges in social media market research
Despite its advantages, social media for market research isn’t without pitfalls. There are plenty of obstacles to overcome, so it’s worth being aware of the core ones you might encounter before getting started.
Data privacy concerns
Because of regulatory frameworks like GDPR, consumer data protection should always be top of mind.
You need to make sure you’re gathering data responsibly and staying transparent about its usage, all while following local and international guidelines. Ignoring these rules can damage your brand reputation and lead to penalties.
Information overload
Social media moves at lightning speed, and parsing that volume of data can feel overwhelming.
To cut through the noise, it's a good idea to implement strategic filters or use advanced tools that help you focus on relevant market research only.
Bias and representativeness
Not everyone uses the same social media channels, so if you're focusing on one platform over another, your research might tilt toward more active demographics.
You can get a more accurate picture of your overall market by combining multiple data sources, using cross-platform analysis, and maintaining a balanced approach between quantitative data and qualitative data.
Consistency of findings
Single snapshots of social data might not reflect ongoing trends.
Instead, you should aim for continuous monitoring over an extended period. Continuous monitoring over an extended period provides more reliable data by revealing patterns and preventing the misinterpretation of temporary spikes as permanent trends.
How Brandwatch can help
When it comes to using social media for market research, Brandwatch makes the process a whole lot easier. Our platform offers a comprehensive suite of products designed to capture and analyze massive volumes of social media data.
By pairing robust data analytics with user-friendly dashboards, we make it easier than ever to transform online chatter into valuable insights. Here’s a look at a few ways Brandwatch can support your journey.
Brandwatch Consumer Research
If you’re seeking a deeper understanding of how your target audience feels about your brand, products, or services, Brandwatch Consumer Research can help. The platform uses natural language processing and AI-driven analytics to find patterns among huge amounts of social data.
From sentiment analysis to advanced filtering by location or demographics, Brandwatch surfaces the most important takeaways quickly – so you can make smarter, data-driven decisions faster.
To accelerate insight discovery, brands can use AI Search in Brandwatch to explore conversations and uncover trends more efficiently. And Iris Conversation Insights will organize and group large volumes of mentions into digestible summaries and key themes – making it easier to identify the most impactful conversations.
Real-time social listening and alerts
Brandwatch’s real-time capabilities make monitoring brand mentions across global platforms simple.
You can set up alerts that notify you whenever a certain keyword spikes, giving you the power to respond promptly to potential PR issues – or jump on a current event that aligns with your brand. Whether you're looking for competitor intelligence or direct feedback, these on-the-spot notifications will keep you informed.
Brandwatch Social Media Management
Coordinating your marketing campaigns and social channels is a breeze with Brandwatch Social Media Management.
This tool will help you publish content based on the themes you’ve uncovered in your market research, and then track its performance all in one place. And with real-time social listening built in, you’ll know immediately if your posts are resonating with different audience segments.
Unified data source
No more juggling multiple tools for social surveys or competitor analysis. Brandwatch consolidates your social media market research under one umbrella, streamlining how you access, visualize, and act on data.
This unified approach helps you stay consistent in your analysis, share insights across departments, and craft more holistic marketing strategies. But even better than all of that, it's a huge time saver.
Ready to take the next step?
Social media market research allows you to capture an accurate picture of consumer conversations, dig into customer comments, and turn unstructured data into valuable insights.
But it's not just about listening – it’s about truly hearing what your market is telling you, and then making changes that show you've paid attention.
These days, harnessing social data is a must for any brand aiming to thrive.
If you can integrate social market research into your everyday workflows, you'll be able to guide more impactful marketing strategies, and ultimately create stronger relationships with the people who matter most – your audience.