Brandwatch’s Social Panels Allows Market Researchers to “Read the Room” When There Is No Room

BRIGHTON, ENGLAND, September 2, 2020 — Today Brandwatch, the digital consumer intelligence tech company, unveils its newest feature: Social Panels. This addition to the Consumer Research platform brings traditional panels and focus groups into the 21st century by allowing researchers to carefully craft panels and focus groups out of authors from the social web’s most frequented platforms.

Conventional, in-person market research can be inefficient, and amid a pandemic nearly impossible to conduct. Excessive amounts of time and money are exhausted gathering consumer insights that focus groups and panels yield, but even with those investments there are limitations. A lack of accessibility and geographic restrictions give global brands a very regional view of their consumers in a time when the world is more connected and globalized. Social Panels provides enhanced consumer insights at a fraction of the cost in real time.

Social Panels is unique in its versatility. Panels are created two ways:

By uploading a custom list of authors from a range of content sources
By conducting a flexible panel search to combine various demographic filters to identify the right group of people.

These panels become more versatile, still, when you use them to filter social conversations within Consumer Research. Panels will reveal insights across subject matter by seeing how a defined audience discusses any given topic. Then researchers have the ability to benchmark panels against each other and then again against the general population. Lastly, there’s the ability to analyze historical conversations within a panel – a practice that simply isn’t possible with traditional market research. This flexibility isn’t an option with live studies out in the field.

“We built Social Panels not only to provide robust, representative unprompted insight from social data, but to completely challenge the notion of traditional demographics,” said Rebecca Carson, Chief Product Officer at Brandwatch. “The modern consumer demands personalization, and to provide this we need to go way beyond segmenting populations with limiting labels like age, gender, and socioeconomic status. We need to understand what motivates a group of people, what drives their passions, and to discover their real, unprompted behaviour patterns.”

Social Panels goes beyond demographics as panels can be created with the most relevant individuals providing their unprompted thoughts and opinions. This method mitigates response bias by avoiding participants who feed into the research and provide researchers with answers they think the research dictates. Panelists will now be completely unfiltered, honest, and representative vs. the offline population.

About Brandwatch

Brandwatch is the world’s pioneering digital consumer intelligence suite, helping over 2,000 of the world’s most admired brands and agencies including Unilever, Walmart and Dell to make insightful, data-driven business decisions.

The company underwent the industry-transforming merger with Crimson Hexagon in 2018, and has made three acquisitions to date: PeerIndex (2013), BuzzSumo (2017) as a standalone content marketing platform, and Qriously (2019) to add global survey capabilities.

Brandwatch has offices around the globe including Brighton, Boston, New York, London, Berlin, Stuttgart, Paris, Madrid, Sydney and Singapore.