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Social Media User Research: Ideas and Benefits

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(This post is a follow up of this other publication)

By Ruslan Enikeev

Focus on your user:

First you have to set goals and measurable objectives that make sense to you and the rest of the team and in accordance to the overall mission of the organization. This way you and  your team will have clear benchmarks to conduct your online user research and know exactly what and who to look for.

Then think of the types of person you want to learn about, mostly people that is of interest for your organization, which is likely to actually want to engage with it in the future.

This will help you set clear, specific and founded goals and objectives for your future projects based on gained insight. Implement these goals and track success metrics. The key is to observe often, track regularly, and determine what caused the spikes and dips.

When doing a user research (in social media or any kind of site), try answer the following:

  • Who are the current users?
  • What are they using it for?
  • Where are they using it (mobile vs. desktop)?
  •  Why are they using it?
  •  How long are they using it for?

This will help you learn how to: Collaborate, communicate, and connect.

1. Collaborate: Become the “go to” organization in your field and share your expertise with the users.

2. Communicate: Tell the stories your target user wants to hear, curate and share engaging and emotional content.

Content is the reason we create websites to begin with. Define your content plan: To start, you will build a list of your current inventory so you can see what you already have.  What types of content are those people passionate about and likely to share? Target content based on needs/interests of individual communities: try to tailor your content and messaging to the specific needs and wants of each specific social community.

3. Connect: Be a bridge and join people together, create community. Try to connect with people by truly being interested in their world.

Think Creatively

Learn how to creatively motivate and emotionally engage with people by listening to them and actually being curious of who they are, what they want and the overall dynamics of their specific community.

Learn about what type of content is good to post, how to increase their social media reach.
Determine which social networks will let you to reach your goals: You can figure out which networks are right for you with a little bit of market research and experimentation.

Learn how to create clear calls-to-action based on your gained insight and post them on your site or network.

Take in account that everything changes, even worst when it comes to social behaviors, and most changes we cannot predict so be ready to take your eraser and rethink and rework your overall strategy. This is ok if you are ready and plan ahead for this, so yo can take it as an opportunity to improve and keep learning.

How to pitch a Social Media Research with the higher ups

Show them these articles, well not so much. Share data that proves your social media success. Don’t be afraid to brag about your new gained insight and the path in which you and your team are on thanks to social media research. Nothing says success more than success. Try to spend time on the web researching, observing, and interacting with users. Look for patterns, try to explain this patterns and identify key influencers in the observed dynamics and behaviors.

Moreover, to use and organize your research data you can choose to build multiple tools, for example: Personas, Mental models, Actors maps, Character profiles, a Journey map describing the interactions of the user with the platform or amongst them. Also you can do Paired comparisons between communities or platforms. Build User stories about the interactions of the users with the platforms, competitors profiles or pages, or between them. Just to mention a few deliverables you can show your team or any stakeholders involved in the project.

Ethical considerations:

  • Don’t create fake profiles to spy on other users.
  • Don’t use one profile as an example as they are real people, just agregated data.
  • Don’t use user profiles as personas.
  • Don’t build your personas based on people’s identities. This is about getting to know the user but not ping pointing anyone, because these are real people and we most respect them.
  • Don’t make fun of the users information or content online.
  • Have fun! Social research is about human connection and story telling so try to enjoy the journey.

Research Tools

(recommended by Liana Evans from Clickz)

Google Trends (free): This is a free tool from Google that you can use to identify trends happening currently.

Google Insights (free): Google Insights is a little different than the Trends tool in that you can choose the terms you want to compare in trending.

Twitter Trends (free) Using the trends that aren’t promoted can lead you into conversations that are very relevant during the moment and can gain you quick insight.

Technorati (free):  By searching on either “Blog” or “Post” for certain key phrases; you can discover who are the key bloggers that have some sort of “sway” with their followers.

Compete and Quantcast (mid-tier fees): These two tools give you demographic data into a site’s makeup. These sites allow you to get a feel for ages, genders, referrers, and a lot of other significant data about a site that will better inform your strategy.


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