Success has always been about listening to customers.

In the old days, product and messaging was done by word of mouth and a personal touch. Nowadays, you can analyze the content of Fan Pages comments and Group Discussions.

With social media, users speak about what’s on their mind in abundance.

Their comments and sentiments are easily available on social media. You can invest a bit of time by analyzing the content of Fan Pages and Group Discussions. This will help you make informed decisions about future social media content and product messaging.

Let’s look at how it might work by using a practical example:

Dunans Castle – Home of the Scottish Laird Project.

We’re going to analyze their Fan Page, and we can do that because it is a public page, and the data can be downloaded and analyzed by anyone.

The owners seek funding to renovate this historic castle. They promote a product that targets people from elsewhere in the world. People are asked to send small donations which in turn grants them a Lairdship or Ladyship.

It’s a creative and fun way to get people involved who otherwise would not be receptive to a making donation for such a cause.

As one would expect, visitors to their Fan Page are supportive. But even with all generally positive comments, there are still some insights which you can learn from about what people really think. They tell you with their comments!

Let’s consider one of the ways that analyzing user comments have helped the owners.

We’ll start by analyzing one of their posts, a photo of the castle as it stands now, beautiful, majestic and a proud statement of Scottish heritage.

Their fans reacted by leaving clicks, but many also left comments.

You may have noticed that a significant proportion of users observed that the renovations didn’t seem as far along as they thought.

This is a a learning opportunity for the Fan Page owners!

These people are showing there may a dis-connect in the Fan Page messaging compared to what people are expecting.

We can only guess at the reason. I’m thinking that since the owners periodically invite people to visit,  some people have the expectation that there are more amenities at the site itself. People may have been taking the owners invitations to come stay there quite literally! Further, I think the owners didn’t realize people would expect to be able to stay AT the castle.

From having learned what people are thinking by using social media, the owners were able to do two things:

Firstly, in terms of mitigation, the page owners responded by adding a comment to one person’s comment on the Fan Page. They gave an explanation of the progress. By monitoring Social Media, they learned of and mitigated a publicity issue.

Secondly, they can now incorporate messaging about the status of the construction up front, to avoid such misunderstandings. They can pro-actively post topics pertaining to peoples’ expectations, in this case the progress of the renovations. If they are issuing invites, they can be more clear about the accommodations and amenities that will be available onsite. Donors will understand better the status and can start with a completely positive and realistic expectation of the product/service.

Dunans Castle were able to do it by logging into Facebook itself. Most fan page owners do it this way.

If Dunan’s Fan Page were a busier site, with potentially hundreds or thousands of users and comments, they might want to download the comments and use Excel to identify trends, patterns and outliers in peoples’ sentiment.

NEXT Analytics offers a FREE software package that download all posts, comments, users, and their reactions into Excel. This free software lets you read and analyze what users have said in Excel.

Social media can help preempt the separation between what the product is, and what people think it is. Indeed, it can help marketers understand what people really want and need, and align their messaging to that. This will help convert and retain future buyers.

As you can see from this blog post, analyzing the content of Fan Pages and Group Discussions can assist product managers to improve their messaging.

When customers and prospects have realistic understanding of the product and service, then they will be happier customers.