#tweetsmart

Chapter 4. Twitter Market Research

Tweet this Project

Your Twitter audience can offer you far more than just sales and community. If you put aside your sales goals and profit and loss statements for a moment, you should begin to see the not-so-obvious benefits that come from having a collection of thousands, or tens of thousands, of instantly contactable people at your disposal—each of whom is familiar with your company.

You work every day to make great products or provide great services. It’s a struggle—I know!—and you have to make decisions every day that will impact your customers. Often, the right answer is not obvious—would folks prefer a red option or a green? Chocolate or strawberry? This title or that title?

Many companies spend millions of dollars polling, polling, polling the general public hoping to find an answer that will recoup the millions of dollars they’ve spent in asking the questions. It’s a risky proposition. However, while large companies will always find reasons to spend millions of dollars on market research, you don’t have to. You have a targeted and engaged Twitter audience packed with your ideal customers. Therefore, when you’re faced with making a tough decision that will affect your customers (and your sales), you have the luxury of being able to plain-ol’ ask them for their preference.

This is the purest form of customer engagement. Invite your followers into your decision-making process. This strategy will accomplish several things.

1. You Will Get an Answer

No matter your question—whether it’s “What should we title this book?” or “What color do you want for a vacuum cleaner?” or “Which logo do you like better?”—you will get plenty of feedback. You may choose to use the feedback you receive—or you may choose to junk it—but you will be able to base your decisions on the opinions of the people who are most likely to buy (and recommend) your product.

If the question is simple, it should be simple for people to answer you. You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) go to lengthy extremes to set up a response collection mechanism. If you’ve got a simple question, think of this approach as sticking your finger in the wind. You don’t want to ask people to go through a lengthy survey process when all they need to do is give you a one-word reply: “Green.”

If you’ve got multiple questions—or you really want to dig into market research—you can absolutely set up a sophisticated (and simple to use) response collection mechanism. There are plenty of wonderful services out there that will help you do this—SurveyMonkey, Wufoo, TwtSurvey, etc. Find a service that will let you organize and present the questions in a way that will appeal, and make sense to, your audience. Once you’ve created the survey, send a message to your followers with the question (or a teaser question) and a link to where they can submit their reply. Your response rates will be lower with this method than with quick questions asked and answered via Twitter, but you should still be able to collect enough data to make it worthwhile.