3 Ways to Use Social Media

In the last post, we discussed the reasons that social media doesn’t represent a valuable source of data for most businesses, despite the popularity of referencing social media technology in today’s marketplace. It simply doesn’t have the qualities of good data that a company needs to make wise decisions. Still, like most tools, there is some value that can be garnered from using social media.

These include: Discovering Quick Hit Reactions When your company releases a product to the market, you can sometimes get a good idea how the market received the product by looking at their instant reactions via social media. If the product is generally well received it should get a fairly positive response. If it is not, you should see a negative response.

However, that does not mean that you should take it as gospel either. Innovative products are usually perceived negatively before positively because people tend to dislike change.

In addition, as we discussed in the previous article, only a small subsection of social media users bother to share their opinion on most products, and many of those are competitor or spam profiles/accounts. It’s useful, but imperfect. Taking Great New Ideas One potential use of Twitter and Facebook, however, is as a free source of new ideas.

Consumers all over the world are sharing their ideas for free, and while very few are going to be the next big thinker in the industry, it’s not impossible that one of them shares an idea that makes your company go “aha! Why didn’t we think of that?” Free ideas are free ideas, regardless of their source. Preparing a Survey There are ample parts of the survey planning phase that may benefit from integrating ideas found on social media.

For example, if your survey is too long and you need to cut it shorter, you can see if there are any questions that are more/less discussed on social media, and use that to influence which questions you should ask. You may also have a list of ideas that you’ve garnered from looking at social media and choose to place them into some of your survey questions.

However, always remember that there is no substitute for your own experience, so using only social media would be foolish. Social media does appear to be overrated from a business perspective, simply because there are far too many companies that view social media sites as the true pulse of the community.

But while they are likely being used too often in ways they are not meant to be used, they do have their value, and the above list represents three potential ways your company can use social media effectively.