subject: Social Media A Means Of Collecting Valuable Information [print this page] Of course, everyone knows that social media has turned to be a very vital public relations and promotional tool. One of the best benefits of using social media is that it offers you to monitor your brand. To discover the frequency of mentioning your company, the search engines in Twitter or Facebook will be quite helpful. Applications that are capable of delivering the information in real-time to your desktop have been developed.
On the other hand, this form of information actually just tells you about the visibility of your brand but does not give any information about peoples perception of your brand. If you desire more exact feedback, there is the need for you to get proactive. You can use social media to pull together exact information concerning your business, new products as well as services from the potentially prospective clients. It is also a powerful tool for gathering precise information about the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and other issues.
Here are some ways of taking advantage of the social media to collate comprehensive information about your business:
* Post a survey using your Blog or website: Survey has become popular on a good number of websites. When you log on to a news site, you may come across a survey about your preferred sports team or movie; indeed, survey is a means of getting a lot of information about those who visit sites. Feedback forms have developed from the mere cards you receive in restaurants to brief surveys on websites, and it is quite easy to get them adapted for use in the absence of programming knowledge.
A specific service that enables you to create any type of a form is WuFoo; with this service you can create variety of forms such as open-ended questions, polls with radio button or multiple choice questions. As soon as you create survey, you can simply use the cut and paste function to embed it on your blog or website. Besides, you can sign in to your WuFoo account to obtain instant reports on the result of your questionnaire or survey. It is also possible to bring your polls up to date as you go.
* Generate a Facebook Poll: A lot of companies in recent time are increasingly becoming aware of the impact of a facebook page. Giving access to the innumerable number of users all over the globe with Facebook is about the simplest but fastest ways to reach a wide audience. Perhaps your business or brand is already having a Facebook page; it will be a good idea to include applications in order to keep your pals involved and keen on your brand. When you incorporate applications such as polls to your Facebook page, you are not just getting information from your friends but they are at the same time passing across their interest in your brand to their other friends. The import of this is that you have a perfect opportunity to collate information and also raise the number of your audience.
* Take Responsibility: With social media , companies are provided with low-cost and effective techniques for collating information from consumers. It is easier for you to post information about your forth-coming products and/or services and you can get a large audience informed about your brand. Embarking on market research has some challenges and there are certain disadvantages that accompany the use of social media to carry out market research. For instance, as you post sensitive information about your brand requesting for feedback from customers, this may as well reveal some of your strategies to your competitors. As a result, your social media market research should be structured in such a way that it gets you the required information without revealing any sensitive information about your business
