How to do market research with social media

Classic market research asks: surveys, interviews, focus groups. Market research on social media observes. It collects what people post and comment about a category when nobody is asking them anything.

Both are useful and neither replaces the other. A survey gives you a representative sample and answers to closed questions. Social media gives you people's real language, the topics you had not thought to ask about and changes as soon as they start.

Step 1. A business question

"What is being said about my category" is too broad. Something specific works better:

• What stops people from trying this kind of product?
• What do they expect from a brand in my sector that they do not find today?
• Which market trends are gaining weight in my category this year?

The question decides everything else: which networks, which period and which content goes in.

Step 2. Where and when to look

Each network has its own audience and its own way of talking. TikTok and Instagram now hold a large share of the conversation about consumption, especially among younger audiences. The period matters as much as the network. A window that is too short mistakes a spike for a trend, and one that is too long mixes different moments.

Step 3. What content goes in

Define the corpus: which accounts, hashtags, topics or searches. Include content from brands, creators and ordinary users, because each tells part of the story. And note what is left out. An honest study says what it did not look at.

Step 4. Classification criteria

Before analysing, agree on how you will classify what you find: topics, motivations, barriers, emotions, formats. This is what turns thousands of videos and comments into something comparable. If you use AI, these criteria are what you need to teach it, and part of the sample has to be checked by hand.

Step 5. From data point to consumer insight

A data point is "30% of comments mention the price". A consumer insight explains what is behind it: perhaps it is not the price, but that nobody explains why it costs what it costs. Getting there means reading the pieces, not just counting them. With video, it also helps to look at which format and emotion come with each topic.

Step 6. A conclusion you can act on

The study is done when someone can make a decision with it: what to communicate, what to launch, what to stop doing. Back it with real examples and with the limits of the data.

What a study like this cannot tell you

• It is not representative of the whole population. It speaks for those who post and comment, not for those who only watch.
• It does not measure purchase intent. It measures conversation. Sometimes the two go together and sometimes they do not.
• It depends on data access. You can only analyse what is public and what each platform allows you to query.

That is why it works better as a complement to traditional market research than as a replacement.

How we do it at Trendia

We analyse TikTok and Instagram videos from the inside, with our own models checked by people and official access to Meta and TikTok, and deliver the reading with its data and its limits. See how we approach market research and consumer insights for brands, or a real project from start to finish.