Social media is creating better opportunities to engage and share expertise, family photos, and self-aggrandizing quotes (ok, maybe I'm just talking about myself, but you get the point.) Specifically, Twitter has empowered us to drop pint size knowledge in under 140 characters. Its popularity is increasing with each tweet. According to eBiz, Twitter is the 9th most visited website on the Internet. From teenagers to corporations, Twitters' penetration makes it an attractive option to conduct market research.

Beyond the live micro-blogging capabilities, there are golden opportunities to obtain business intelligence from the Twitter communities.

Here are the 5 most effective ways to use Twitter for market research:

Person-to-person communication: A market researcher can jump on their mobile app of choice and ask a question to their followers. Within seconds, you can expect to receive feedback from people. Twitter removes the barriers that inhibited you from engaging with your market on a personal and low-energy basis. Stream of conscious monitoring: The beauty of Twitter lies in its simplicity and dynamism. This social natural observation allows you to deepen your understanding of consumer values and beliefs in a purely unfiltered way. According to Daze Info, 175 million tweets are sent daily. The data warehouse facilitated by Twitter is an analysts' Shangri La. You can monitor the pulse of your customers and inform your qualititative analysis towards brand equity. Broadening your market research scope: The world is using social media at a rapidly increasing rate and on the go. According to Socialbankers, 66% of user-generated tweets mentioning brands are done via mobile devices. Your customers are discussing you all the time. It's your job to put yourself in the position to listen. Discover latent consumer insights: It's about what you don't know. An organization's downfall could invariably stem from failing to account for factors that they never knew. The raw communication provided by Twitter gives exclusive access to how a customer really feels about you and even improves your responsiveness to customer issues. Learn your customer's social media language: A major mistake that an organization can make is to expect the customer to learn how to talk to them. Social media is an arena where each network has its own tone and language. It behooves the brand to learn how to relate to the customer in their language to facilitate a positive relationship.

For more information on how social media can supplement your market reseach, follow us on Twitter.

Thanks for reading!

Richard Washington

Marketing Manager

MarketResearch.com