How to get insights from product feedback on social media

Socrates said, "I know that I know nothing". And that's true for all of us, especially when we need to guess or predict the behaviors or motives of other people. 

Even if your product is not new to the market, and you believe you know your target audience well, there is always the risk of missing crucial changes and losing your position. There are several ways to be on the same page with the audience, including conducting surveys, researching, and monitoring social media. 

This post will go through one of the mentioned methods of gathering and analyzing product feedback: using social media listening tools.

Discover product issues and fix them

Any product may face difficulties such as technical issues, logistics delays, bad contractor work, and so on. It can take a long time for companies to grasp the scope of the problem or pinpoint the primary issue bothering customers.

When the product is digital, customers may rapidly alert you if something goes wrong via support channels, in-app chats, and so on. However, if the product is physical, it becomes difficult to monitor the problem until it escalates.

So, where would all the dissatisfied customers go if there is an issue with the product? Exactly, they would use social media to contact the brand quickly or to share their unpleasant experience with others. Meanwhile, consumers frequently overlook tagging the brand while posting on their personal pages or in groups, making it challenging to detect such mentions unless using social media listening tools. 

Nevertheless, large corporations that own multiple brands or, vice versa, managers who market a product with numerous features might face the problem that the number of mentions is enormous, making it difficult to analyze them properly. In such cases, it's handy to segment all mentions by topics using the Smart tags feature. For example, you can create custom tags for each feature or topic related to your brand to analyze them separately. Imagine you represent a bank. In this case, it would be more convenient to categorize mentions as ATMs, credits, cards, mortgages, and so on to have relevant analytics for each of these products.

Collect and analyze detailed real-time feedback 

As we mentioned above, social media is a place where things are moving fast, so brands need to stay updated on current discussions and their sense. It's not enough to simply collect mentions; the powerful technology is required to provide real-time analytics. 

What are the most discussed topics? What do people like or dislike about your product? How do they feel about the brand? Sentiment-based aspect analysis provided by YouScan can give the answers to all these questions. Powered by artificial intelligence, the system comes up with detailed graphs and dashboards containing all the needed data.

Here's an example of the Oatly's dashboard, which includes the top five discussed aspects and the sentiment. Recognizing that the contents of their non-dairy milk is one of the most crucial aspects for their customers, the brand should think of changing the recipe or at least the communication about it. 

Discover what features lack in your product and what are useless

Aside from responding to user requests or opinions, brands can also analyze the demand for specific features. Companies may believe that they must create a product similar to their competitors (because everyone else is doing so) or because they have a vision of how people will use this product. In reality, customers, not creators, drive product development.

Even large corporations with massive amounts of data produce something that falls short of the mark. LinkedIn is the most recent example, launching stories on their platform simply because they were popular on other networks. Unfortunately, this feature was not well received by users, and the platform decided to disable it. 

Apple's notorious butterfly keyboard is another example of a brand being forced to modify a product due to poor user feedback. Millions of MacBook owners were outraged by the frequent breakdowns of the keyboard with the so-called butterfly mechanism. After some time and a few lawsuits, the brand decided to reject this type of mechanism and go back to the scissors one.

On the other hand, sometimes brands face the situation that a big part of the audience asks for a certain product or a new feature. However, this does not necessarily mean that the brand should immediately develop everything that users ask for. It's crucial to examine whether this will be profitable in the long run.

Analyze mentions where the feedback is not explicit in the text

Another advantage of social media is that people might share their experiences not only in text but also with the help of photos. Often such posts feature brands but don't contain any caption, so it becomes challenging to find them. That's when YouScan's in-house built image recognition technology can be handy. The system is able to track and analyze images on social media if they contain a logo; no tags are needed.

Why monitoring visual mentions is crucial? Consciously or not, people share the consumption situations, which brands should analyze to market their products better. User-generated content is full of hidden visual insights of how the products are used in real life, especially if consumption situations differ greatly from the brand's perception. 

Failures happen to any business, but there is a difference between one-time incidents or regular occurrences. That's why it's important to monitor negative situations and make sure they will never happen again. 

Glossier, for example, is well-known for its excellent customer service and visually appealing design. But no one is perfect. As seen in the screenshot below, there was an issue with the packaging, which was far too large for the supplied product. By keeping track of such mentions, the brand can optimize its logistics or develop new types and sizes of boxes.

Pringles is another example. Even though millions of people enjoy the taste, the packaging frequently draws negative reviews. The most common issue is that it's difficult to get the chips out of the tube. However, because it is the main jam, it is unlikely that the brand will modify the packaging. Meanwhile, there are some cases when the package design should be improved, such as the photo we discovered using logo recognition. As one Twitter user pointed out, it's difficult to read the white text on the yellow background, and it's surprising that such a large brand would approve such a design.

Social media feedback is a valuable source of consumer insights that brands can get in real-time without conducting long and expensive research. However, it is equally crucial to encourage your clients to leave feedback, and it entirely depends on you, would it be positive or not. Nonetheless, the more insights you have, the more opportunities for your business to improve.

Are you ready to go further into what your customers say about your brand or product? Request a free YouScan demo to gain valuable insights.