This blog entry will discuss how a company could gain insights from potential customers through the customer’s use of social media.  To focus this discussion, I will look at a specific type of user, and, by understanding how this specific user interacts with social media, try to extrapolate how a company could tap in to important customer insights.

Get to know the social media user:

Ashley is a 30 year old female who spends extensive time on different social media sites.  The main reason she is at these sites is to consume information.  Ashley very rarely shares information.  Depending on the type of information she is CRAVING, she will visit either Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Foursquare, or Spotify. 

If Ash is looking to see what her friends and acquaintances did over the weekend, she will browse the Facebook newsfeed.  This is where most of her “social media” time is spent. If interested in a particular post or picture, she might click in to the person’s profile to get more information.  She rarely uses Facebook to consume branded content – it’s mostly about seeing what her friends are up to.  That being said, if a friend posts an article or likes a brand, she is probably more apt to click in and explore.  Ashley uses Facebook multiple times every day on all of her devices: iPhone, iPad, and laptop.

She LOVES Pinterest to pass the time and get fun ideas for recipes, outfits, and decorating.  She also gets to see what her friends like and what is trending on the overall post.  The “pins” provide inspiration and influence some of her clothing and decoration style.  Mostly, this is a place she can ASPIRE to make amazing food, buy adorable outfits, and plan the perfect wedding.  She browses Pinterest once a day usually from work or on her iPhone if bored.

LinkedIn is for making connections on the professional side.  Ashley uses it to stay connected with old co-workers and new business contacts.  She only really uses LinkedIn when she is looking for a job or thinking about making a career change.  It could be months in between logins.  She only uses LinkedIn on her laptop.

A new user of Foursquare, she really likes the idea of getting deals when she “checks in”, but doesn’t really like sharing her location with people, so keeps this option private.  She often forgets to use the application on her phone but is really trying to remember to take advantage of the deals.  When she sees her friends doing it, she is more likely to follow suit.  She only uses Foursquare on her iPhone.

Finally, Spotify, which is integrated into Facebook allows her to see what her friends are listening to and share playlists.  She loves to use this as a source for finding new music, using people with similar tastes in music as a resource. She only uses Spotify on her laptop a few times a week.

Gather insights from behavior?

This type of user is particularly hard to gather insights from because she is such a passive user (ie. doesn’t post, comment, like etc. with frequency).  Since she spends the majority of her social media time consuming information on Facebook, I would want to understand the demographics of her friends, and (provided she updates her profile) where she is from, what type of interests she has listed, music she enjoys (Spotify), her education and work experience, and her relationship status.  In relation to these items, it would be nice to track how these change over times.  Did she get married? Have a baby?  Get divorced? Move?  Buy a new house?  Get a promotion?  A company could use Pinterest to see what specific items she likes to understand what is important to her.  Is she only interested in clothes or does she post pictures of wedding dresses, houses, and cute babies?  Does she like motivational posts about losing weight or exercise?  LinkedIn could be used to understand what motivates a person professionally or to estimate income levels.  From this information, insights about her life, motivation, drive, among others, could be gathered.  One thing to be mindful of is who she portrays on social media versus who she really is.