When your business is on social media where you already have an audience, there are a lot of valuable insights you can gain. These insights will help you make better marketing as well as business decisions.
Now, brands have been diving deep into their social media analytics to track audience footprints, response rate, engagement, etc. A bunch of brands is utilizing social media analytics tools in order to provide better content and services to their audience.
I won’t deny that this helps but let’s take a look at the simplest way to gain insights.
Surveys!
Because let’s agree that there is no better way to know your audience than from themselves.
In fact, social media surveys can give you valuable yet surprising results. As 87 percent of survey-takers want to have a say in a company’s future products and services, it’s evident how beneficial and informative social media survey responses can be.
If you haven’t started using surveys in your social media marketing, you might have many questions in your mind right now. Firstly, let me clear the importance of surveys for your business.
Why are Surveys Valuable for your Business?
Your focus is to provide your audience. And to provide them with valuable solutions, first, you need to know them. And it’s also essential to understand what your customer thinks of your product/service or where and when they need you, right?
Surveys can help you big time with that. This traditional tool in your marketing toolbox can measure customer perception of your product/service. This can help you identify any potential problems your customers may face so that you can find proper solutions for them.
Creating a survey is no less than art. You can tailor your social media surveys in creative ways to gain the best insights from your customers. It will also let you drill down on concern areas, which can bring valuable awareness for your brand.
This can be the most beneficial on social media because you must already have a potential audience to respond to your surveys. So long as you are using social media for branding, you can easily leverage your follower base and receive more sincere survey engagement than you would when interacting with a broader unknown audience.
On this take, let’s see how you can use a survey on social media.
How to Use Surveys in your Social Media Marketing Strategy?
Posting a survey on Facebook is relatively easy and can be done quickly in a few steps.
- Create a new post on your social media and click on the three dots far right.
- Select the “Poll” option from here and fill out the information required, i.e., question, answer options. Add photos and gifs to elaborate your options better.
- Set a run duration and keep in mind to give your customers enough time to respond to your poll and then click on the “Post” button.
Posting a survey on Twitter can bring great insights. Here is how you can do it.
- Create a new post and click on the icon with three bars.
- Fill out the necessary information including your question and answer options. Feel free to add more emojis.
- And then, tweet your tweet.
Creating a poll on Instagram requires you to necessarily post a visual so you can jump into your creative shoes and create a visual for your poll. These polls usually have a time limit of 24 hours. Here is how you can create one.
- Upload or click a picture in the story section.
- Choose the poll sticker and place it on the picture wherever you want.
- Ask your question and write answer options and then post it on your story.
Now that you know how to use surveys on your social media networks, let’s go through the benefits of why you should use them.
Benefits of Including Surveys in your Social media marketing Strategy
1. You can get more audience to trust you
As a brand, when you provide valuable content to your audience, they will start to come back to you when in need. And as soon as your content, product or service starts helping the user, they begin to trust you.
Well, there is one more little thing that can make the users trust you.
Asking them what they think!
When you conduct social media surveys and try to know the audience’s point of view, they would inevitably appreciate the gesture and keep your brand in their good books. Because who doesn’t like to be asked to share their perspective!
2. You can break the ice
When a user starts interacting with a brand on social media, it’s usual to have uncertainties and a lack of confidence because that’s human nature. No human can trust a brand or even a person just like that.
It needs efforts from both sides and what you can do best is get to know them better. Using surveys in your social media marketing plan can help know the audience’s choices, perspective, pain points, likes, and dislikes, etc. This can guide you further in providing better content to them.
Because when you know the user, you will eventually provide them better. Keep working on it so that you don’t give them vanilla when they are looking for chocolate.
3. It can foster conversation and engagement
It takes a lot for brands to do more than just talking about their product/service. Brands are now actively hiring content creators and social media managers to create content that talks to their audience.
Conducting social media surveys is one way to do that.
You should instantly jump in your creative shoes and think about what can be asked to make your audience talk. Know what they are into and get the user interested with a few tricks. And, the next thing you know is that they are engaging with your brand.
Look at how Instagram polls can be used creatively to get people talking.
But for this to work out, you must post on your social media networks regularly with creative content. I understand that there might be times when you will feel overwhelmed, and then there might be times when you are out of ideas.
But don’t stop posting!
If needed, let any social media marketing tool like Sendible help you post regularly and curate content. Though Sendible can be somewhat limiting in pricing structure relative to the number of users, you can also try out several Sendible alternatives from the market.
4. Learn your audience’s voice
To get the users to interact with your brand, you must also make them relate to you. And getting to know them so deeply isn’t a walk in the park.
When you start feeling that, switch to social media surveys.
They can help you know a lot if looked at with an analytical eye.
You can get valuable insights from them like familiar phrases, keywords, most asked questions, trigger words, etc. These insights and daily keyword rank tracking can help you increase your social media engagement quickly. Because as soon as you grasp your audience’s communication style, they start relating to your more.
5. You can get more time from your audience
This is a simple yet important one. As soon as you start making efforts to get the user interested in your product/service, they eventually spend more time around your brand on social media.
And now that you are using surveys, they are spending more time than usual in filling out your surveys, checking your social media profile, etc.
This is one of the goals of any brand on social media, right?
To get people to spend more time around them!
And, here you have another technique to do it.
Also, don’t just start posting social media surveys. Take time and get creative because as creative as you get, the more the user will be interested in your brand. Ask questions that they can quickly answer and give them enough options to choose from.
Pro Tip: Avoid asking too many descriptive questions. Give multiple options they can choose from.
Make them type less and choose more.
It’s a wrap
Even if you have the perfect social media marketing strategy, you can’t deny that you must have assumed a lot of things about your audience while creating it.
You can definitely track all the actions taken by the audience, but you cannot precisely know why a user interacted on a certain post and not on the other.
Surveys can help you big time!
Because they give you insights that are beyond metrics or any analytics tool.
They can give you answers to descriptive questions like this:
- What is triggering customers to make purchasing decisions from your content?
- At what stages of the buying journey the customer thinks of you as a provider?
- Why did a particular ad or piece of content work, and why it didn’t?
While doing all the hard work, don’t miss out on the A/B testing required for your social media surveys. Because improvements should always be welcomed.
Can you think of any other ways to include surveys in your social media marketing?
Happy Social Media Surveying!
Author’s Bio
Surya is an SEO Strategist. He often looks out for new strategies to optimize the content. He is a problem solver by nature, a mountain person to the core, and music calms the chaos in him.
