The Importance of Research in Social Media

Research is something no one thinks about when it comes to posting on social media or viewing what others have posted on social media. However, researching before and after posting to social media is very important and can lead to a lot of valuable insights about the effectiveness of your post. Through research, you can determine which social media platforms are used most by your target audience, the best times to post to receive the highest exposure and the types of posts your target audience is more likely to engage with. For example, a younger target audience will be more drawn to a video they see on Twitter while an older target audience might respond better to a lengthy Facebook post with a lot of information and detail. It’s very important that you fully understand your target audience and their social media habits before you can successfully reach them over social media.

Another area research is highly important in is advertising. More specifically “pay to play” advertising meaning that the more money you are willing to pay, the more your advertisement will run and the more people will be exposed to your advertisement. Before you go all in on a social media advertising campaign there are few things you should consider. First, you need to determine whether or not the benefits of running social media advertisements are going to outweigh the costs. Luckily, advertising through social media is actually quite affordable and is something that can be done by individual users, small businesses and even multinational organizations. Once an organization or user decides to launch an advertising campaign over social media they can track insights of the post such as how many views it has, how many people actually clicked on the ad, what kind of people are viewing the ad, what times people are viewing the ad and other valuable insights that you can use to determine the effectiveness of the advertising campaign.

Knowing what kind of audience is on each social media platform is almost just as important as knowing what to post on each form of social media. Let’s say you’re developing a dating app to be used by college students. You want to advertise the new app over social media, but you have a small marketing budget so you will only be able to pay for one marketing campaign on one social media platform. Due to your target audience being college students, you probably wouldn’t want to use Facebook to promote your new app. Facebook has become more popular with those in older generations such as parents or grandparents and far less popular with high school or college aged kids. If you are trying to reach audiences in these younger generations you are better off using Instagram or Snapchat to run your promotion. Facebook has become obsolete for these younger generations, yet Snapchat and Instagram have become widely adopted by members of younger audiences. These platforms will provide the highest probability of advertisements being seen by high school or college aged kids. 

Research is perhaps the most important part of posting to social media and can be the difference between a successful marketing campaign and a disastrous one. Research provides users with valuable insights about their different target audiences and the different platforms available. Conducting thorough research before posting to social media will allow you to determine who your target audience is, what the best way to reach them is and the overall cost of running the social media advertising campaign.