How to Execute an Effective Market Research Campaign on Facebook

Market research used to be an expensive, drawn-out process that required phone calls and manual information collection. Now, researchers can easily collect information through Facebook in a matter of minutes.

Facebook has grown far beyond a simple social media platform to become one of the largest and most effective market research organizations in the world. More and more market researchers now realize the power of using Facebook to gain more insight into their target audiences.

Here are some features that will help you execute your Facebook market research strategy more effectively.

Facebook Audience Insights

Perhaps the most powerful market research tool on Facebook is their Audience Insights platform. Each Facebook business page comes equipped with this feature. It provides a wealth of information from post reach and engagement to number of likes and shares.

By using this feature, you can get an accurate assessment of your audience’s response to any new content, brand updates or marketing initiatives you release. This in turn helps gather market research on your audience’s preferences based on the metrics Facebook provides. You can also gain valuable information about their demographics, location, purchase behavior and more.

Your Own Social Connections

Your friends and fans on Facebook can tell you a lot. Search your connections to learn what kinds of businesses they like, how they interact with them and more.

Looking through the pages of competitors and businesses similar to yours can also give you ideas. How are they interacting with their fans? What kinds of posts have the most engagement? How can you incorporate these ideas into your own marketing?

Your friends and fans will also see the content you post on their home page feed, so if you’d like some input from them directly, consider a Facebook Poll.

Facebook Polls

Need answers? This simple feature lets you construct polls for gathering information directly from the source: your audience.

With Facebook polls, you can ask a variety of question types: multiple choice, ranking scale of 1 to 5, yes or no and text. Once you’ve finished designing your poll, Facebook provides you with a share link you can post on your own Facebook page or embed in your website.

Want to get a higher response rate? Facebook ads can promote your poll to a wider audience.

Facebook Ads

Getting people to actually participate in your market research campaign can be challenging. Facebook Ads gives you the opportunity to market your campaign to qualified members of your target audience.

For increased click-through rates and engagement, make your ad appealing and relevant to members of your target audience. Here are a few tools below to get you started:

Canvas

Facebook’s free software Canvas can help you create beautiful, full-page multimedia ads. In a news feed, the ad looks like a typical ad, but once users click on it, they enter an interactive full-screen version where they can scroll, swipe, click links, view product galleries and more.

There’s no added charge for using Canvas to build your ads, and since they’re hosted on Facebook’s servers, the whole experience is faster to load than an external link.

Pixel

Facebook also provides software that tracks individual users on different devices. Pixel offers conversion tracking, optimization and remarketing. Once your pixel has tracked 100 conversions, Facebook allows you to create a “lookalike audience” of users who are similar in demographic to the people who visit your website.

Facebook offers precise targeting options based on their “relevance scores” technology, which assigns tags to every user and every ad. These tags ensure that ads find the most relevant audience.

Search Tool

The search tool is one of the most basic features on Facebook, but it’s also surprisingly powerful. You can use it to check hashtag use, look for similar businesses nearby, see what your friends like and more.

Facebook might just be the most powerful market research tool at your disposal. It has incredible amounts of information about its users, and it’s willing to share that information with you. This makes market research faster and easier than ever before.

Using a combination of Facebook’s features to their maximum potential will broaden the scope of your market research campaign and help you gather a variety of high-quality data that you can use to better connect with your target audience.