Want to know more about your customers? Look them up on social media. People put an amazing amount of information in their Facebook profiles, Twitter bios and (sometimes) LinkedIn profiles. Skim their bios, and you’ll not only be able to gather a lot of information quickly, you’ll also be able to put together personas, or basic profiles of who your customers are, from age and gender to location to lifestyle.
But you can do more than that. In an article published this summer, Social Media Examiner offered up 3 great tools to help you learn even more about your customers, all of which I took for a test drive. Here they are, and here’s what I learned:
Use Followerwonk to learn more about your Twitter followers. The tool pulls information from their bios and puts keywords into a word cloud, thus allowing you to make better decisions about what content to share on Twitter.
The site also analyzes your followers, so I found out some really interesting information about my Twitter followers: I gain the most new followers on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and I gained a ton of new followers mid-August.
If you want to be more visible on social media, use the super detailed reports from Tweriod to find out when your audience is socially active so you can post content at ideal times for them.
I signed up; it took about 30 minutes to get my results, which were delivered via email (with a link to my account on the site). I learned a lot of incredibly valuable information, like the best time for me to tweet on the weekends is between 1 and 2pm, 4 and 5pm, and 6 and 7pm.
Klout is all about measuring influence, a topic I recently wrote about. If you want to find out who your audience deems influential, Klout topic pages curate the top influencers on different topics. If you can get a quote from a key influencer your audience cares about, you’ll likely get a lot of engagement – and traffic.
I went into Klout, and found my top influencers on Twitter: Mashable, Jonathan Perelli, Tech Cocktail, Heather Huhman and SmartBrief. I then looked up the top Marketing influencers, a topic I care about, and they are Chris Brogan (no surprise!), Brian Clark, John Jantsch, Olivier Blanchard and Brian Solis, all of whom I now follow and will be keeping an eye on!
What other tools have you used to conduct customer research, whether through social media or not? Share your favorites in the comments section below!
Image courtesy of berxblog.blogspot.com.
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