How Social Media Analytics Impacted the Use and The Role of Quantitative Marketing Research
Introduction
Qualitative marketing research is the process of collecting large amounts of data through surveys, interviews, focus groups and questionnaires. Marketing research is vital before a business undertakes key marketing tasks inclusive of preparing a marketing plan, carrying out SWOT analysis, developing a product, branding of products and pricing. Marketing research gives a business the opportunity to develop products and services that fit the needs of the target market. Qualitative marketing research helps businesses understand what their customers think and feel about their products, how the customers are able to choose between different products and suppliers, how the branding, packaging and design of the products influence them and how pricing affects their decision making. Electronic social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram have gained momentum to become major forms of communication and presented the general public with a platform where they can express their attitudes and opinions. Recently these platforms have become a source of data for market research. Social Media analytics as an approach for understanding attitude and opinions in the market place has impacted quantitative marketing research by filling in its role and use.
Social media analysis has matured to the point where organizations are no longer using, surveys, focus groups and interviews but are instead relying completely on social insights to carry out marketing research. The use of traditional methods of conducting market research including the use of ethnographies that are not only time consuming but are subject to biasness has greatly reduced (Nguyen, 2014). To get the best possible understanding of customers’ organizations would rely on the triangulation process to combine results gathered from several techniques into one complete data set but now a huge volume of information on customer sentiment and opinion are available online and organizations do not have to use time consuming and expensive techniques to find out what their customers are thinking. They just need to find a way to analyze the data from the internet and social analytics has made that possible. The coming of social media has also brought with it a range of new research techniques such as insight communities, smartphone ethnography, social media bots and netnography (Batrinca, et al., 2015). These techniques might create something more than observed data thus making social media analytics more effective.
The continuous use of social media analytics has raised the question on what is the place of traditional methods and will social media totally replace them. One advantage of social media analytics over the traditional methods is that it automates and scales the process of finding insights. Businesses are now able to gather customers’ feedback on their products, services and campaigns quicker and the results have proved to be authentic (Branthwaite, et al., 2011). Through gathering and analyzing of data social media analytics is in a position to deliver solid information and insights that a company need to make decisions on packaging, branding, designing and pricing. Companies are still in a place to use the traditional methods of quantitative marketing research only if the company can afford the resources, in terms of money and time to triangulate and confirm social media insights but many businesses lack the funds and are less convinced that there is a need to confirm these insights.
Social media analytics is not only in a position to completely take up the role of quantitative marketing analysis but also is in a position to complement this role. When organizations choose to first analyze online data they are in a position to look at the results and then stakeholders and researchers can make a quick decision on which ideas presented to them on social media are worth pursuing, this will save businesses a lot of time and expenses since they will not be pursuing all leads but specific leads (Branthwaite, et al., 2011). Also, using these social platforms customers can be notified on upcoming campaigns and surveys and the business can easily segment the audience according to demographics and geography.
Both the quantitative marketing research and social media analytics try to figure out what should be done, how it will be done and what were the results, both of these methods can effectively help in figuring out the three but social media analytics outshines quantitative marketing research when it comes to figuring out how it will be done, this is because, methods such as surveys, interviews and focus group take a lot of time to prepare and analyze. Organizations practicing real time marketing and ones that want to make rapid changes cannot wait for the results from these methods. In contrast, social media can provide immediate responses and companies can easily optimize campaigns to fit their users and to get better results (Nguyen, 2014). Social analytics has also made it possible to effectively and accurately analyze data that is gathered from online conversations while a survey will be forced to obtain this information from respondents while in social media it is already present.
While quantitative marketing research cannot enable organizations to identify key spokespeople and influencers of their brands social media has made it possible and now organizations are in a place to pay attention to these individuals, connect with them and engage in conversation with them more easily (Nguyen, 2014). The use of social media to conduct marketing research is killing some of the important aspects of quantitative marketing research. The first aspect is conversation, which is a direct dialogue with a costumer that is done face to face or through platforms such as skype. Conversations are dependable and credible and are seen as an insight to peoples thoughts, ideas and feelings. Social media analytics is making headway to replace face to face conversations that are carried out during surveys. The second aspect is the power of listening, this is acquired by building a trustful atmosphere with the interviewee where the marketer can converse and listen to each other. The third aspect of Quantitative market research that is being slowly killed by Social Media Monitoring is empathy, this aspect is achieved through the skills of the interviewer (Branthwaite, et al., 2011).
Social media has given people a platform where they can express their thoughts rapidly. With social media customer’s trends and attitudes can be mapped using minimal time (Patino, et al., 2012). The traditional marketing methods often place customers in the listening role, where the customers are answering the asked questions, social media is opening the channels of communication and marketers are now engaging in actual conversations with their target audience, the conversation is now about hearing what the customers want instead of marketers telling the customers what they think they want (Singh, et al., 2019). Despite the many advantages of social media analytics it has its own limitations such as; most product users might fail to comment on social media platforms and the available comments focus on the good and bad of a products or services and leaves a lot of information out. It is also very hard to recognize if the comments are of a non-user or from a user and it is also not possible in some case to recognize comment that are associated to specific regions and sub groups. The dynamic nature of social media also makes it almost impossible to compare two campaigns or activities. In some countries only a small percentage of individuals have access to the internet and in most cases international brands have to resolve to traditional techniques to takes these customers into account. Lastly, social media analytics can be regarded as young and with techniques that are evolving fast and ones that are not well established, therefore they cannot be relied on completely (Stieglitz, et al., 2018).
Conclusion
Social media analytics is the insight collected from customers on online platforms. These analytics have greatly impacted the role and the use companies have for quantitative market research techniques such as focus groups and surveys. These analytics makes collection of data on customer’s feedback easy, cheap and fast. Despite social media analytics having the upper hand it has its own limitations. For the time being social media analytics and the traditional quantitative market research can co-exist as one serves to enhance or validate the other. As the participation of people on online platforms continues to rapidly increase so does social media analytics continue to be more sophisticated and the day social media analytics completely replaces quantitative market research may not be far off into the future.
References
Batrinca, B., &Treleaven, P. C., (2015). Social media analytics: A survey of Techniques, tools and platforms.”Ai&Society 30,no. 1(2015): 89-116
Branthwaite, A., & Patterson, S. (2011). The power of qualitative research in the era of social media. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, 14(4), 430-440.
Nguyen, H., (2014). Should Social Media Analysis Replace Traditional Marketing Research? Retrieved from; https://www.netbase.com/blog/social-media-analysis-replace-traditional-marketing-research/
Patino, A., Pitta, D. A., & Quinones, R. (2012). Social media's emerging importance in market research. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 29(3), 233-237.
Singh, S., Arya, P., Patel, A., & Tiwari, A. K., (2019). “Social Media Analysis through Big Data Analytics.”: A Survey. Available at SSRN 3349561
Stieglitz, S., Mirbabaie, M., Ross, B., & Neuberger, C. (2018). Social media analytics–Challenges in topic discovery, data collection, and data preparation. International journal of information management, 39, 156-168.
