As social media listening matures, it is moving beyond its initial PR, marketing and customer service functions. Companies are now finding additional benefits from social media monitoring.
As social media monitoring cuts across departmental silos within large organizations in manufacturing, health and medicine, technology, finance and retailing, product development has emerged as a major new application of social media listening. Social media monitoring can reveal a product’s strengths and weakness, consumer preferences, market trends, and competitive threats.
Organizations can obtain consumer feedback in near real time — immensely faster than traditional marketing research. Social media also delivers more consumer feedback, helping assure greater accuracy.
Product satisfaction. By monitoring social media conversations surrounding their products, companies can determine their product’s shortcomings and strengths, helping guide future product enhancements. The insights can also lead to new products that would not have otherwise been considered. Brands can also recruit customers through social media to participate in product trials, and then monitor social media to gauge the product’s success.
Audience segmentation. Social media monitoring and measurement tools can filter and analyze data based on demographics, geography and sentiment to provide detailed analysis and insights. By listening to social media conversations, companies can learn more about their target audience’s interests. This knowledge can lead to profitable partnerships and improved marketing strategies. By analyzing industry trends and monitoring trending topics, companies can find where their products fit into the overall market.
Competitive intelligence. Companies can also monitor conversations surrounding competitors’ products. They can take care to avoid similar issues that prompt complaints and quickly emulate features that elicit praise from consumers. They can also watch for sudden increases in social media activity which may indicate a new product introduction or new product features causing major satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
Product Case Studies
Through social media listening, Wendy’s found that consumers were worrying about the nutrition of fast-food. Fast food customers didn’t know the nutritional content of the food and didn’t want to break their diets. In response, Wendy’s created an app that provided nutritional information about items on its menu. It also changed the branding of its value burger in an attempt to promote social sharing after finding that customers were not eager to tell friends they had just bought a cheap burger.
In some cases, customer outcries on social media can prompt rapid product modifications. Microsoft learned that customers disliked the fact that its Xbox One needed constant internet access. Portability, they said, was a key feature for game consoles. Microsoft responded quickly to revamp the product.
Listening Methods
In conducting social media listening for product development, it’s crucial to employ Boolean search techniques that hone in on consumer comments about product features and issues while eliminating extraneous results. Social media monitoring services offer better coverage and more accurate results than staff employees can obtain using desktop search tools.
Gathering relevant social media feedback is only the first step in the product development chain. Someone needs to actually read and pay attention to the consumer feedback, analyze and interpret the comments, and finally determine how to change the product to better satisfy customers.
Social media listening during product launch can provide near instantaneous feedback of customer feelings about the product and their insights about product features. Their views are very much worth capturing and then building into product development.
Bottom Line: Social media monitoring has become a valuable instrument to identify customer concerns or complaints about product features and to gather intelligence on what new features customers want – supplementing, enhancing and speeding up traditional market research techniques. Unless a company employs a Steve Jobs who can unerringly anticipate customer wants, social media listening is an effective and cost-efficient tool to guide product development.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
