Types of Qualitative Research Methods for Mining Data from Social Media

With over 4.5 billion active users globally, social media continues on a phenomenal growth trajectory. Apart from being interactive platforms, social media has a lot more to offer for businesses looking to capture vital customer insights. Given the highly-targeted levels of user-friendly experience social media platforms offer, they can be a great data mine for businesses looking to collect public preferences and open-ended feedback. This requires market researchers to deploy a blend of different types of qualitative research methods. Continue reading as we discuss the different types of qualitative research methods for mining data from social media.

Why choose social media?

As mentioned before, social media is an ideal place to study public opinion. The commenting feature on posts, replying feature on stories, and chat boxes set the perfect base for researchers to gather experiences and feedback from competitors’ customers, which can help businesses to optimize their services or products to maximize profits. Compared to other data-gathering tools such as surveys and questionnaires, social media platforms provide quick, extensive, and targeted insights. Conducting descriptive qualitative research on social media platforms requires deploying the right methodologies suitable for businesses, depending on the follower base and engagement rates. This is where it is advisable to leverage market research services to acquire actionable insights for business growth.

Different Types of Market Research Methods for Social Media

As mentioned earlier, conducting qualitative market research on social media requires comprehensive knowledge to determine where to deploy which tools and methods. These include:

• Conducting polls: For big businesses with hundreds of thousands of followers, conducting simple polls can be beneficial, however, small businesses or startups with fewer followers, hosting story polls can be misleading due to low engagement rates.
• Asking questions or MCQs: Asking questions or MCQs in social media feeds provides descriptive answers that reveal customers’ emotions and thoughts about a topic, service, product, or issue.
• Social Listening: Organizing social listening groups such as ‘Twitter Spaces’ helps people actively engage and share thoughts and opinions about an industry, brand, product, or service.

Methodologies Channel-wise

Owing to their unique features, different social media channels require different market research methodologies to target people of all age groups, professions, and demographics. Let’s take a look at some of them:

Instagram

With over 1.2 billion active users in 2021, Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms for both entertainment and expanding businesses. When it comes to gathering qualitative insights on Instagram, having a robust engagement is a decisive prerequisite for assessing public opinions. Hosting polls through an emoji slider, MCQs, and Q&A sessions are some of the best ways to conveniently collect descriptive opinions.

Twitter

Twitter is among the top social media platforms that allow an exchange of concise messages frequently through a user-friendly user interface. To collect insights on Twitter, organizing Spaces (audio groups in which various people can hold discussions), and conducting polls are the best tools to evaluate what people are thinking; their preferences; and what they want.

Facebook

Facebook is a popular social media platform that allows people to connect. According to a recent study, 97% of businesses (both B2C & B2B) also use Facebook. To conduct qualitative research on Facebook, researchers can conduct polls & contests on their profile Feeds and publish calls-to-action/engagement posts (asking people to leave comments about issues such as how they feel.)

Final Word

In a hyper-competitive world where every business aims to capture a lion’s share of the market, utilizing different types of qualitative market research methods can make all the difference. Unimrkt Research, one of the best market research companies, is a reliable partner for businesses looking to capture valuable insights to power decision-making and growth. We deploy different types of qualitative research methods across different industries for businesses all over the world. To discuss your requirements or learn more about available market research services, call +91-124-424-5210 or +91-9870-377-557. You can also email sales@unimrkt.com or fill out our contact form, and we will respond at the earliest.