Jillian Ney
This article considers social media intelligence in market research, including the tools needed to analyse conversations and the challenge of how to extract value from the millions of online conversations that happen daily. Social media can be seen as the largest focus group in the world, however, unlike other forms of online research, the challenge is to extract value from the millions of online conversations that happen daily without asking any direct questions and without anyone knowing you are there. To get the scale required to analyse social media conversations, we rely on social analysis tools, from analytics to audience interest mapping to social listening. These tools require a skilled end user to analyse and interpret the data to turn the conversations into insight. As an industry, market research must overcome the barriers associated with social media intelligence.