Three Tips to Use Facebook for Market Research

(This post was originally published here)

Who are your target customers and what do they want? How big is your target market? These are critical questions for any business.  For start-ups, they can inform whether the business is viable and be necessary to secure funding.  For businesses of any size or maturity, they can inform activities from product development to marketing planning. However, traditional market research techniques used to answer these questions can be expensive and even challenging if a market is new or niche. If you are looking for alternative (cheap and easy) options to research your market, here are three creative ways to leverage the Facebook account you probably already have.

Profile your customers using your company page

On your company page, go to the ‘Insights’ section. There you can see characteristics like age, gender, and location for people who have liked your page. These followers are usually representative of your highly engaged customers, an important group to understand.  You can also assess how you are reaching your audience with information like where your likes came from and the reach and engagement level of your posts. All of this data is helpful as a snapshot and as a way to track changes in your reach and customer base over time. In particular, as you execute specific marketing activities, this can be one of the tools you use to measure impact.

Estimate market size using the Facebook ads tool

Go to the ‘Create ad’ page in Facebook and enter any goal and website address to enter the tool (the selections aren’t important since you won’t actually create an ad). Now, change the settings under ‘Who do you want your ad to reach?’ to match your target customer profile. You have the ability to get really specific about your target with attributes including demographics, interests and behaviors, and connections to people, pages, apps, or events (for example, you could look for people who like your competitor’s page). As you change the settings, your audience definition and size will update on the right side of the tool. Of course, this estimate is only as good as the information that Facebook users provide, but it’s an easy (and free) way to get a ballpark idea of your target market size.

Distribute a survey via your company page or paid ad

The simplest way to distribute a survey on Facebook is to post a link to your survey on your company page and ask followers to complete it. If you want to reach a broader audience (and have the ability to invest in the effort), consider running a paid Facebook ad that is distributed to your target audience and asks them to take your survey. (The process to specify your audience and create the ad is the same as described in the market sizing suggestion above.) In both cases, you can use a tool like SurveyMonkey to create the survey and collect the data. You should offer an incentive to respondents who complete the survey (for example, a discount or gift card) to ensure you get a decent response rate.