Certainly everybody understands that social media has become a very important public relations and advertising tool. In fact, one of the most powerful advantages of using social media is the ability it provides with regards to monitoring your brand.

If you want more specific feedback, you have to get more proactive. Social media can be used to gather specific information from clients or potential clients about your business, new products and services, the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, and other issues. The following are a few ways that you can harness the power of social media to gather detailed information about your company.

Surveys have become commonplace on many websites. If you visit a news site you might see a survey about your favourite sports team or movie and in fact you can get quite a lot of information about site visitors with a survey. Indeed, feedback forms have evolved from the cards you get in restaurants, for example, to short surveys on websites and they can be easily adapted for use without any programming knowledge. One service that allows you to create any kind of form, including open-ended questions, multiple choice questions, or polls with radio buttons, is WuFoo. Once you create your survey it is easily embedded on your website or blog with a simple cut and paste function. Moreover, you can log into your WuFoo account where you get immediate reports on the outcomes of your questionnaire or survey and you can even update your polls as you go.

Many businesses nowadays are aware of the impact of a Facebook page. With millions of users around the world, Facebook represents one of the easiest ways to reach a wide audience quickly. If your company or brand uses a Facebook page, you can add applications to keep your friends” engaged and interested in your brand. By adding applications like polls to your Facebook page, your friends are not only giving you some information but they are also communicating their interest in your brand to other friends. This means, you not only have an excellent opportunity to gather information but you can increase your audience as well.

Using Twitter allows you to share links to your webpage or blog and likewise to any polls you may have posted. Once you have used a service like WuFoo you probably want to attract as many people to the poll as possible. Sending out a link to your poll on Twitter allows you to bring your Twitter audience to your web page and subsequently gather information from them. In addition, there are even feedback applications that have been designed specifically for Twitter. This gives you immediate information. All you need to do is set up your account with a company like PollDaddy, create your question or pole, and then questions are automatically tweeted to your followers.

Likewise, TwtPoll, is another Twitter polling service that has a built-in feature that allows respondents of your poll to further tweet the poll question to their followers. This vastly expands the size of your audience and gives you more realistic information about the perception of your brand (really, if you always ask your followers what they think, you might not get the most honest feedback...imagine what would have happened with Vista if Microsoft only polled people who love Vista).

Posting a YouTube video comes with two major advantages. First, you can reach a wide audience with whom you can share your company and brand information. YouTube is becoming more and more popular and because it s free it can be a great place to expand your brand s reach. In addition, YouTube allows for more detailed responses to your brand. YouTube users can watch your video and share detailed comments about what they think and feel about it. Also, you can cross-link between your video and your webpage or blog thereby increasing traffic to your website and to your video so you gather more information from more users.

Social media provides businesses with low-cost and efficient solutions for gathering information from customers. You can easily post information about upcoming products or services and you can inform a large audience about your brand. Conducting market research has never been easier but there are some drawbacks that come from using social media to conduct market research. Namely, using social media means you are putting information out on an open platform that almost anybody can access.

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