At the end of the day, the only opinions that matter are the ones your customers have about your products and services. And if you want to gather valuable feedback, social media is a pretty good place to begin.
Why Social Media is a Gold Mine for Feedback
If you really want to get technical about the purpose of social media, it’s not as light and fluffy as most users assume. Yes, it’s a place for gathering, communicating, sharing, and engaging with people from around the world.
But at the core, it’s a data collecting machine that’s curating trillions of data points every single day. As a business owner or marketer, this can be beneficial – if you know how to lean in and access the data that’s sitting right in front of your nose.
Today’s social media platforms are so sophisticated and engaging that people will voluntarily hand over information. These algorithms and data collection frameworks can then connect dots and build robust profiles on individual customers and groups of people to be used for marketing and advertising purposes.
5 Ways to Gather Feedback Via Social Media
While you don’t have access to everything that Facebook knows about a specific user, for example, there’s plenty that you can learn by knowing where to look, what to ask, and how to engage your own followers. Having said that, let’s discuss several simple (and completely ethical) ways to gather customer feedback.
- Surveys
Surveys can be highly effective when distributed properly. Surveys typically require more time and effort for the user, so they almost always need some kind of incentive attached. That incentive could be something as simple as a free PDF download, free entry into a drawing, or a discount code for a future purchase.
- Polls
Social media is great for polls (and most platforms now have native polling features that make it easy to gather results directly inside of someone’s newsfeed). Social media polls should be simple and/or visual.
For example, let’s say you’re working with your consumer packaging company to create a new design for your product. You want something that grabs customer attention and really speaks to them. You could run a poll with images of four different design options and let people vote. You might find that 75 percent of people like one specific design, while just 3 percent of people like another one. Depending on the sample size, this could help you make your final decision.
- Contests
Most marketers don’t think about social media contests as a form of data collection, but they certainly can be. The key is to integrate some sort of survey or feedback element as one of the requirements for entering the contest. You can think of it as incentivizing people to give you feedback.
- Social Listening Tools
Social listening software monitors and analyzes online conversations about your brand, topics, industry, and even specific keywords. It automatically scours various social networking platforms and highlights information that’s important to you and your brand. This information is then sent to you as an alert, notification, or part of a regular digest. This is a proactive way to sniff out customer sentiment as it plays out.
- Analytics
You can tell a lot about your customers and the overall health of your brand by studying the native analytics that are provided by your social media profiles. You should pay especially close attention to metrics like audience growth, reach, engagement rate, interactions and reactions, post engagement, and top-performing content. Track these insights over time so that you always know which direction you’re trending.
Ready, Set, Go
Are you overwhelmed? Don’t worry – you don’t need to implement every single one of these ideas. Start with one method and try it out. If you’re going to run a contest, put 100 percent of your focus into running the best contest you can. Then, once it’s done, look at the results and see if it was worth it. If it didn’t garner quite the traction or feedback that you wanted, you can switch your focus to another method (and so on).
Eventually, you should land on a method that works with your brand and audience. And once you find it, you’re going to have a steady flow of valuable feedback that can be leveraged to improve and grow your business.
