New Brandwatch Social Panel tool for virtual focus groups

Brandwatch adds virtual focus groups to platform with Social Panels.

Consumer research has been tricky during the pandemic. It’s been challenging to run focus groups and polling. Survey fatigue has also become an issue.

Brandwatch reckons it has an answer. It has developed a tool as part of its Brandwatch Consumer Research platform to listen to public conversation from specific groups of people by demographic or interest.

Brandwatch’s Senior Product Manager, Emelie Swerre unveiled the new tool on a webinar hosted by the Social Intelligence Lab this week.

Tracking public opinion by people and interests

Social Panels enable practitioners to track conversation and benchmark opinion on public areas of the web and social networks.

It also lets practitioners interrogate historical conversations using Brandwatch’s archival data.

It’s an application layer that sits on the platform helping automate and scale consumer research.

Data can be integrated in two ways: either by uploading a list of social handles, or by searching users that meet a predefined criterion.

The upload feature enables a brand to create a bespoke panel based on social profiles such as customers or prospects.

Search allows you to look for users that meet based on biography, gender, location, profession, interest, or followers.

Data integrity and use cases

Brandwatch collects author data from sources including: 4Chan, Amazon, Facebook (owned channels), Instagram (owned channels and pre-December 2018), Reddit, Sherdog, Tumblr, Twitter and Yahoo!

Social Panels can be used to track opinion among a group of people where you have a record of social accounts; by location such as Newcastle to determine regional attitudes; or by a topic such cycling, hair care, hiking, or vegan food.

They can be used for the development of consumer insight, the development of products and services, competitive monitoring, and brand health.

Data compliance

The tool is GDPR compliant. The data that Brandwatch processes is all publicly available and is published by the author.

Social Panel’s limitation is its strength. It’s focused on conversation from public users and areas of the web.

Brandwatch claims that Social Panels overcomes bias inherent in traditional research techniques.

Panels are created with the most relevant individuals providing their unprompted thoughts and opinions.

It avoids participants who feed into the research and provide researchers with answers they think the research dictates.

Availability

Social Panels are available to Brandwatch customers as part of the Brandwatch Consumer Research platform.