Using Twitter for Market Research

We know that Twitter has roughly 20 million plus users and growing. Actually by the time I write this post it could have doubled.. who knows? Anyway, you also know that these 2o million people are answering to their followers and the world, the question, ‘what are you doing now?’.

Imagine there was a way you could find out what people are wanting, what they are asking for, what questions they have that have remained unanswered, by simply asking the question: What’s everybody doing? How powerful would that be? If you knew that one of the most asked questions and problems people faced bringing home a brand new puppy was actually  ‘what should I name my dog?’, would you do things differently? How many profitable products could you release based on what topics are really hot right now?

You also know what whenever you search a question in Twitter you will receive a load links to information and affiliate products rather than genuine concerns and questions. Even if you find the good stuff, filtering through the clutter would take forever and a day. So doing the above is virtually impossible without endless days of work.

Well I’ll tell you that it is possible. I’m going to show you a way you can cut through the clutter, find the information you need so you can create relevant products and sell them for profit. Are you ready?

Ok here it is:

Visit Twitter Search. Now Type this in: (obviously replace keywords with whatever you like)

-http Insert Keywords Here since:2009-05-30 ?

What have I done?

1. By putting the ‘-http’ I have removed most links so you don’t get people trying the redirect you through to a page of information or their affiliate product.
2. The ’since:2009-05-30′ asks Twitter search to only find stuff relevant since that date. You can take it back as far as you like to get a larger response. (in the Year/MM/DD format).
3. The “?” at the end tells the Twitter search engine that we are only after questions. ie Anyone know how to stop a dog barking?. Also because we have removed the links we won’t get any questions like this -> Want to know how to stop a dog barking? Visit http://etc etc. So we have filtered out all the rhetoricals and commercial questions and replaced these with genuine concerns. You can remove the “?” and you will get more responses including both statements and questions so either way will work. I just used the ‘?’ in this example to show you another feature you may want to implement.

What do you do now?

Essentially the fiddly time consuming stuff that would usually takes days, even weeks to do, has already been done! Now go through the findings in Twitter, read the posts and jot down the concerns one by one. You will start to notice a pattern developing about what people are after and what’s in demand. This is your market research data. Take this, run with it and create an in demand and profitable product.

To see this in action check out my video at the Bootstrapedia Blog