How to Use Social Media for Product Positioning (A Simple Guide)

If you already have a product out in the market, you need to determine its product positioning. This is the process of finding out how your target audience perceives your product. Maybe there’s a disconnect between how you, as product owner, see your product as opposed to how the market views it. 

From here, you can make the necessary changes to align the market perception with the product and vice versa. Doing so could help you increase your sales and revenue down the line.

Among the many channels where you can conduct product positioning, social media is one of the best places you can do it. And to help guide you in the process, below are steps that detail how you can leverage the different social media channels to figure out how the public views your product.

Research Your Competitors

Before even launching your product, you probably already have a clear idea about who your competitors are. These are brands that offer the same or similar products in the same market. 

Your goal is to “spy” on how they use social media for their brand positioning strategy. You want to see if their perception of the product aligns with that of their followers. Whether this is the case or not, you can use the insights you’ll gather here to tweak and improve your brand positioning statement.

Focused market research on social media also allows you to analyze their fans and followers. This will help you see if there’s a massive crossover between who your target audience is and the kind of audience they have. 

If the overlap is enormous, then you want to know more about their social media marketing strategy and the types of social media posts they publish, among others. 

To do this, it’s best to use a social media management tool like Agorapulse or similar that allows you to compare your social media performance against your competitors. From here, you’ll be able to see how well or poorly you fare against them.

This feature only measures metrics like engagement, followers, and posts. However, it nonetheless provides you with information on how your competitor’s social media activity affects their product positioning and, to a greater extent, their brand awareness. You can use the info here to help shape your social media presence that aligns with how you want to be seen by your audience.

At the same time, this type of tool complements the social media tools you’re using on your site as well. For instance, setting up sharing buttons allows your readers to share your post on their socials, thus increasing your brand awareness.

Listen to Your Audience Social Media

Social listening is the process of gathering chatter on social media about your brand’s products and/or services. It collects not only tweets and status updates but also blog posts or broadcasting a conference. You can do this by using a social listening tool that lets you collect posts and tweets that mention your brand. 

This tactic is vital for product positioning because it provides insights into how people view your brand and how they use your products and services. From the data you gathered, you can determine how the market on social media receives your products.

To do this, you need to type in and search your brand name on multiple social media platforms and export the data that appear on your search results. However, doing this manually is a time-consuming process that will suck the majority of your time from doing other important matters.

In this case, a tool like Awario or BrandMentions will help gather the data for you on autopilot. Just type in your brand and/or product name, and either tool will collect all mentions it can find that include the terms you entered in the background. This way, you can 

Determine Sentiment 

Once you have collected all mentions of your brand on social media, it’s time for the most important step: sentiment analysis.

This allows you to identify what users felt when they mentioned your brand. For instance, if the post has a negative sentiment, that means they have an unfavorable opinion about your brand or product. The same thing goes with a positive sentiment.

Ideally, you want to see the majority of posts about your brand as positive. That means you have a product they’re happy and satisfied with, which also means you have your product positioning down pat. You can use the insights from these posts to help you gain an advantage over your competitors. For instance, doubling down on the features that your audience enjoys with your product helps separate your product from the rest in a good way.

However, it’s impossible to not see negative sentiments about your products. The negativity may stem from your product not working the way it’s intended to not meeting expectations. From here, the sentiment may stem from incorrect product positioning, which may have attracted people who aren’t your target audience to use your product.

The aforementioned tools have a built-in sentiment analysis feature to organize which product mentions have a positive or negative response.`This makes your job easier as you now simply have to verify the degree of the sentiment and address them as you see fit with your brand positioning.

Create Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Now that we’ve researched what others have been saying about your product, it’s time to take action on the insights you’ve gathered from your research and take control of the narrative. 

You can do this by publishing educational content in text or video format about your product based on the positive sentiments it received from brand mentions. By educating your target customers, as well as new audiences, about what your product truly is, you can help shape the public’s perception of it. 

At the same time, you can post polls or ask your followers specific questions about your product. Use the negative feedback you received from brand mentions as the starting feedback and ask them how you can make your product better. 

For example, if the product’s negative sentiment stems from having a high price point or poor packaging, get feedback on how much your followers are willing to pay for it or what they want to see from the packaging. 

Publishing these relevant content across different platforms on social media allows you to not only raise awareness about your product but also develop it right in front of their eyes. This way, they feel involved in the process of change and making your product even better.

Another factor to consider in your social media strategy is your inbox. Expect users to reach out to you via your inbox with their questions and concerns about the product.For instance, someone might be searching for an event photographer near me and come across your product page, leading to inquiries

Some of the questions might not be related to your product. But for those that are, take this opportunity to interact with your audience regarding it. 

They may share how happy they are using the product or voice out their concerns about it. The most important thing at this point is to acknowledge their message and use the information they provided you for insights regarding product positioning.

At the same, how gracefully and swiftly you respond to their messages help build your brand reputation, which in turn could indirectly influence how you position your product.

Conclusion

Getting your product positioning right is critical to its success. And with social media, you can gather data and unearth insights that will provide you with information on how to develop its benefits and communicate them to your audience.With the steps and processes shared above, you should be able to leverage social media to the fullest for your positioning efforts.