Getting consumer insights is not only painstaking, it’s also time consuming and not to mention expensive if you were to tap into the services of a professional market research company. Today, with the advent and proliferation of social networking sites, a social media agency can easily harvest customer insights easily and for free.

1. Mining Social Media for Consumer Insights
A few years back, getting consumer insights is not only painstaking, it’s also time consuming and not to
mention expensive if you were to tap into the services of a professional market research company. Today,
with the advent and proliferation of social networking sites, a social media agency can easily harvest
customer insights easily and for free. It all boils down to effectively using the correct tools.
Be the Missing Piece: Answering Customer Queries
Before you can provide an answer, you must first know the question. In marketing, the best products are
those that provide real solutions to consumer predicaments. And it’s not always about the rational,
functional side of your offerings. Most of the time, it’s about how you position your brand. Social media
marketing companies know that positioning is all about projecting your brand in such a way that it
answers consumer questions.
Yes, in social marketing, you are looking for questions, not answers. Here are the most potent tools you
can use to find these customer queries:
• Twitter. The spontaneous, dynamic and almost instant response Twitter makes it a great venue
for “netizens” to post questions. In order to see the questions Twitter users are posting, you can
simply add a question mark (“?”) to your search. For example, you are looking for specific
questions that deal with “couture fashion”. You can simply type “couture fashion?” on Twitter’s
search bar and all the queries relating to the said topic. A social media agency can then provide
answers to these questions or help a business position itself based on what customers are
looking for.
• Quora. If you’re looking for questions, it is but natural to look in Q&A sites and when it comes to
these websites, Quora is in a league of its own. Dubbed as the best Q&A site to date, you can
either search for specific questions in Quora and what the responses have been so far. Or you
can also search for a particular topic and all questions related to that will be instantly unearthed.
As part of your monitoring process, social media marketing companies recommend including
Quora in your RSS feed simply by adding the term “rss” to the end of a URL. For example if
you’re in the insurance business, you can get feeds of all questions being posted on the site by
going to http://www.quora.com/rss. Easy does it.
The Virtual Virtue of Sharing
In the world of social media marketing, it is better to give than to receive. As important as knowing what
questions your prospective customers are asking is knowing what content they are sharing. It is the
dream of every social media agency for their content to go viral and knowing what your target audience is
passing around in their social accounts will definitely help you in developing your social media content.
Thanks to the boom of social networks, market research has become not only fast, but also inexpensive.
With or without the help of a professional social media company, following the tips above will bring you
closer to a goldmine of customer insights.

2. Author is an Internet marketing expert and wants to share his knowledge with people who are about to
hire a social media company LA, Los Angeles for their business. He has also given words to many
articles where one can find the latest trends popular in SEO and social media marketing companies.