Online communities, blogs and forums are presenting new opportunities for marketers to research their audiences in innovative ways. A report by Forrester Research, published in December, goes as far as to say that social media samples, such as that provided by business networking site LinkedIn, are of high enough quality that B2B market researchers “would be remiss not to attempt to leverage it to the greatest extent possible.”
Formal research versus informal ‘desk’ research
On the possibilities inherent within social media, experts are careful to distinguish between two types: Formal market research, such as that described in the above-mentioned Forrester report, entitled Social media offer some relief for high-quality B2B market research sample; and informal desk research, which may be as simple as manually searching your company name online and assessing what you find amongst the results.
Oliver Truman, research manager at B2B International, is quick to make this distinction. “We’re involved in the fairly disciplined researching of industrial markets,” he says. “But B2B brands can use blogs, social networks, and so on, for informal, qualitative research too.”
How effective is LinkedIn?
Truman, like many other B2B researchers, says he uses LinkedIn, and that it can indeed be a valuable tool for B2B research, given the amount of information the site holds on its members.
“Because we’re engaged in specialist topics and a lot of what we do as a specialist B2B agency is very niche, often respondents are more willing to talk here than they would be on a more generalised survey,” he says.
Other B2B market researchers agree that LinkedIn is an effective tool for targeting specific job titles. What’s more, it now has 55 million members, broken down into 170 industries, according to Richard George, European PR director, LinkedIn – and the site is still growing. This critical mass makes it the only real option for B2B marketers looking to leverage social media platforms for formal market research at the moment, they say.
Diana Mitkov, head of business and industrial at Harris Interactive, has been using LinkedIn’s membership base to conduct research for brands such as Microsoft, which used the platform in order to reach developers, and says that this has worked
“very well.”
She does warn, however, that some industries are easier to target than others. “There is sometimes a shortfall in manufacturing or niche industries,” she says. “In such cases you may be struggling to get the numbers on a site like LinkedIn.”
So, rather than issuing a blanket recommendation, B2B market research experts stress that it’s important to make a decision as to the usefulness or otherwise of social media research on a case-by-case basis. They also predict a further proliferation of specialist or niche forums or communities as activities on the web mature and develop.
So, although LinkedIn appears to be in a league of its own at present – in terms of a platform large and detailed enough to be able to offer sufficient sample sizes and formalised market research tools – other alternatives are more than likely to appear.
Mitkov adds that, in her experience, current limitations on LinkedIn frequently centre around geography. “You can get reasonable sample sizes in certain countries – the US, UK, Western Europe and India,” she says. “I think Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese versions of the site are next on the agenda.”
Will I need an agency?
Specialists also point out that individuals are on social networking sites out of their own free will, and frequently share common interests. This, coupled with the fact that they are unlikely to have been bombarded with numerous requests to take part in surveys on these channels, as yet, do tend to make such platforms more effective than many more traditional research methods.
“The power of communities is that people actually want to be there,” says James Turner, head of research communities and panels at FreshMinds Group. “And businesses are realising that customers often know more about your business than you do.”
Turner, a former head of market research at BT, runs bespoke market research communities, invitation-only, for clients of FreshMinds. He warns that it is sometimes only the opinionated few that will voice their real views online.
Insights like these can be worth paying an agency for. Certainly, experienced professionals can guide B2B marketers in terms of how to avoid bias, or interpret responses, but Andrew Dalglish, director at Circle Research, says that the decision as to whether or not to use an agency will depend on your confidence levels, and the complexity of the research you hope to undertake.
Buzz monitoring
Another area where social networks are being used for research is within social media monitoring – sometimes referred to as ‘buzz monitoring’. Specific tools are being developed for this purpose, which extends manual ‘desk’ research to something automated. They work by recognising certain patterns in text, and whether these display positive or negative sentiment.
Suppliers of such services include radian6, Brand Watch and Meltwater Buzz. Dalgish tells me he’s already an advocate: “Like Google, these companies can trawl the web and by using clever algorithms, detect the tone with which people are talking about the brand,” he says. “It’s smart stuff, I must say.”
Paired with other research methods, the use of online communities and forums can add a new dimension to your findings. Admittedly, there are many limitations to formal market research via social networks at present, but as the aforementioned Forrester report concludes: “The bottom line is that social media sample, such as that provided by LinkedIn, is highly promising. It is worth working through some growing pains to make use of it.”
