How can you use community feedback to stay ahead of emerging trends?

1 Why community feedback matters

Community feedback is the direct communication between you and your followers on social media platforms. It can take many forms, such as comments, likes, shares, polls, reviews, ratings, questions, direct messages, and more. Community feedback is vital for several reasons. First, it helps you understand your audience better and build trust and loyalty with them. Second, it allows you to measure the performance and impact of your content and adjust your strategy accordingly. Third, it reveals the current and potential trends that your audience cares about and expects from you.

2 How to collect community feedback

When collecting community feedback on social media, there are several methods to consider depending on your goals, platforms, and tools. For instance, you can ask open-ended or closed-ended questions to elicit your followers' thoughts, opinions, experiences, or suggestions. Additionally, you could create polls or surveys for your followers to choose from multiple options or rate something on a scale. Furthermore, you should encourage user-generated content that shows how your followers use your product, service, or brand in their daily lives. Moreover, you can monitor mentions, hashtags, keywords, and sentiment analysis to understand how your followers talk about you or your industry online. Lastly, analytics and insights tools can provide data on your followers' demographics, behavior, preferences, and engagement.

3 How to analyze community feedback

Collecting community feedback is not enough; it must be analyzed to draw meaningful conclusions. To do that, you should define objectives and key performance indicators that align with your social media strategy and goals. Additionally, segmenting your feedback by platform, type, topic, audience, or time period can help identify patterns, trends, gaps, or outliers. Quantifying and qualifying your feedback with metrics such as reach, impressions, engagement, conversions, retention, satisfaction, and sentiment will also be beneficial. Finally, visualizing and reporting your feedback through charts, graphs, tables, dashboards or stories will highlight the main findings, insights and recommendations.

5 How to use community feedback to create engaging content

Once you have identified the emerging trends that interest your audience, you need to use community feedback to create engaging content that matches them. Engaging content is the content that attracts, retains, and converts your audience by providing value, entertainment, or inspiration. To achieve this, you should select a format and platform based on the preferences, behaviour, and expectations of your audience. Craft a headline and introduction that capture their attention and curiosity. Provide useful, relevant, and original information that answers their questions, solves their problems, or fulfills their desires. Enhance your content with visuals, multimedia, or interactive elements to make it more appealing and memorable. Finally, include a clear and strong call to action that invites your audience to take the next step.