Social Media – think ‘Research’ not ‘Sale’

 “The bad news for our industry is that we periodically forget that people are notoriously bad at telling us the truth” Stephen Needel, Advanced Simulations, LLC, US

The honest sale?

Everybody is obsessed with digital sales, with social media frequently seen as the main conduit.

But is it?

Stop a think for a second – if people are (as the quote above suggests) ‘bad’ at telling the truth, especially when they know they are being canvassed online, then are companies over-estimating the importance of social media in driving sales?

Should they be looking at social media from a different angle; e.g. from a research rather than sales perspective?

Social Media as Research

This was an excerpt from a recent Institute of Sales & Marketing article:

 “We used big data analytics to scour the web – particularly social networks – to find additional buying signals from prospective firms….and reported that dozens of new markets emerged” 

Data mining is defined as “examining large sets of pre-existing data to produce new information”.

Advantages for researchers

• Availability of like-minded people in groups
• Ability to easily access large amounts of data
• Instant response
• Observation of social trends – when people are not answering a question, they are invariably more truthful

So rather than using social media as purely a sales outlet, reverse your thinking, and investigate whether your company can use social media as a research tool in order to inform future sales