When it comes to online conversation, people create their own content online. This is especially true when using sites like Reddit or Quora.
People utilize these platforms as an avenue for expelling their anger or other sentiments because they do not care about how their comment will affect others.
Therefore, anything someone could want to say about a bad product is typically posted by many individuals through these platforms and remains available to any business.
Utilising these platforms to find information requires a strategic approach instead of just randomly searching through keywords.
The effective utilisation of these platforms for market research involves developing a methodology to sift through all the "noise" of discussion and focus on the recurring themes that are provided by individuals.
Once these recurring themes have been identified, it is vital to score them based on "confidence" for use in future market strategy formulation.
To summarise this effective methodology for using forum research, follow these five steps:
Before starting your research on either forum, clearly define your research perimeter.
Conduct your searches using the search feature of the platforms, as well as with advanced search operators in order to avoid the algorithms of the platforms.
Identify recurring themes, not isolated comments or anecdotes.
Evaluate qualitative (usability) information using "confidence" scoring, to facilitate better future analysis of market strategy formulation.
Validate your results against internal company data.
They will not tell you what the underlying emotional intensity of the search query is.
The forums help bridge the gap between their situational context and the emotion behind a search term.
Reddit - Raw, real, in the moment
Reddit is organized into thousands of tightly-focused communities, each with rules defined and enforced by its users.
The people of Reddit place a premium on authenticity.
People will aggressively downvote and ban anyone who appears to be promoting a product or acting inauthentically.
Because of the anonymity of Reddit users and the community policing that takes place on the platform, Reddit provides a wealth of real complaints, sub-par hacks, and detailed product reviews.
By using Reddit, academic researchers can learn how individuals communicate regarding brands without the brands' presence influencing their communication style.
The Quora experience - Positional intent
Quora operates in an entirely different way. Quora is structured as a question and answer engine.
Users pose specific questions, and professionals in a field or enthusiasts will provide users with long-form, elaborately-formatted answers.
Typically, users who answer questions on Quora usually utilize their real names and provide authentic credentials when using their Quora profiles, which makes the answers on Quora professional and clearly comparative.
On Quora, you can view the specific language that users use when they are trying to solve a specific problem in a better way.
As such, Quora can assist you in mapping out the consideration stage of the buying process.
Using Reddit and Quora for market research purposes
To convert casual social media chatter into reliable intelligence for business purposes, it is essential to establish a clear objective for the research.
Taking a look at the first few Reddit discussions you find, and making an educated guess about them, does not qualify as research.
It is indicative of your own confirmation bias.
A systematic, replicable approach to conducting research will eliminate the risk of your making biased selections of data to confirm your pre-existing beliefs regarding your project.
Step 1 - Establish your research purpose
Make sure you have a clear question in mind before you open Quora or Reddit.
Unusable data is generated through generic searches. Before you begin your research, please make sure you have a clear idea of what you need to research.
Is your goal to validate a product?
Are you trying to find out what types of objections customers have about messaging? Or are you trying to find out what your competition is doing wrong?
You must set your goals.
For example, if you want to do some competitor research, your search parameter could be to find all threads in which customers are comparing Competitor X and Competitor Y during the last 12 months.
Step 2: Use advanced search operators and filters
Search engines that native platforms provide are awfully user-unfriendly.
Using Google search operators to search for what you want on the platform will allow you to search the platform without worrying about any algorithmic biases, allowing you to search specifically for what you are looking for in an exact way.
Use search operators to search for intent modifiers.
To find threads on Reddit related to Hubspot: site:[reddit.com/r/SaaS](https://reddit.com/r/SaaS) "Hubspot" AND ("hate" OR "alternative" OR "expensive")
To find threads on Quora about how to move away from using Shopify for example: site:quora.com "how to" AND "migrate from Shopify" AND "pain"
Once you find a thread that has value for you, do not look at the number of upvotes. Instead, look for the number of long-form comments.
If you see several long-form comments discussing the same complaint and the thread has high numbers of upvotes, you have a strong likelihood of identifying a validated pain point.
Step 3: Look for patterns not just singular anecdotes
Researchers often make a big mistake of creating an entire campaign based on one comment that has received thousands of upvotes.
One comment alone is considered an anecdote.
If you find five of these comments spread out over a few different subreddits, you start to be able to recognize a pattern; thus, you should create an organized way of tracking the frequency of the key phrases.
This way, you will be able to determine statistical significance.
It is suggested that you keep track of the exact comments the customers make and the inferred pain points associated with those comments.
Then track how often that exact sentiment is expressed across different threads.
Step 4: Converting raw data to insights
The raw data is meaningless without being synthesized. You must convert the raw phrasing on the Internet to a discrete business implication.
To convert the user's emotional venting into a specific action your product or marketing team can take, you must map their emotional venting to a business decision.
For example, let's look at the translation of raw data into business implications.
- Raw Data: "I have to migrate the data from our CRM into these dumb reporting spreadsheets every week at 4 p.m."
- Extracted Insight: The lack of native reporting integrations leads to substantial end of week time loss.
- Business Implication: The one-click integration option should be moved up in priority on the product roadmap, and the landing page headline should be refocused to address "Friday afternoon reporting anxiety."
- Confidence Level: Extremely high. This one piece of data was commented on by 14 different users in three different operational sub-reddits.
Real-life applications and scenario constructions
Theoretical frameworks only go so far.
In order to completely understand how this methodology works, you need to examine how different departments use the forum data to address their unique strategic challenges.
Founder product validation
The quickest way to fail building a MVP is not validating the problem.
The founder of a SaaS company that is associated with creating an inventory management tool will never start with writing code.
Instead, they will start with a search on Quora for questions from users about issues with existing tools that cannot sync across multiple warehouses.
If no one is currently talking about the problem on Reddit, it probably isn't a big enough of an issue to create a full blown service.
Founders use this workflow to weed out bad product ideas before their engineering team's resources are expended.
Product marketers must understand why deals do not close.
While some objections may be discovered during sales calls, they may be misrepresented by prospects who are uncomfortable sharing the truth and may want to get off the phone.
On Reddit, buyers will specifically explain why they chose to not purchase a product.
Marketers can take advantage of forum data by scraping forum threads of competitors to find specific reasons (objections) that buyers have regarding price, complexity of onboarding, or missed features.
By documenting these objections, the objections can be countered directly when creating new positioning documents and sales enablement documents.
Content strategists use phrasing extraction strategies
Failures of Content Strategy Occur When Businesses Talk Like Corporations Instead of Humans.
An SEO lead requires human questions from which to create topic clusters rather than relying only on keyword difficulty tools.
To achieve this, a Content Strategist would scrape Quora to find the language that the target audience uses.
For example, if an audience continually describes a process as "pipeline clogging" rather than "lead attrition," the content team should use that same language.
Using the language of the audience has a significant effect on converting prospects to customers.
Evaluating the quality of insights and level of confidence
Not all forum data has equal credibility.
Some threads have been manipulated by bots, and some threads are manipulated by competing companies to portray a negative opinion of another company.
You cannot rely on every comment being a verified fact.
There must be a clearly defined filtering process when determining the trustworthiness of insights and whether they should be used in making business decisions.
Four point scoring rubric
To effectively remove any subjectivity from the research process, every trend/theme extracted from forum conversations should be scored using a four-point scale.
Reviews that have been posted twenty times will have much more potential impact than those who have only one review.
- Specificity: Are there generic comments or particular comments that are exceptionally detailed? For example, "This software sucks" has little specificity, while "The API rate limits every time we do a batch update of more than 5,000 rows." has great specificity.
- Emotional Intensity: Look for emotions in the comments. When people express feeling extreme frustration or relief, this may indicate a higher-priority problem. Mild annoyance, on the other hand, is not typically associated with purchasing behaviors, which is why they do not generate as much sales for businesses.
- Actionability: Will the business have the ability to address the insights? Complaints based on macroeconomic conditions cannot be addressed, while complaints based on a poor user interface can be addressed immediately by the design team.
Understand platform bias and limitations
All datasets contain different biases.
Using Reddit and Quora as the sole source of a go-to-market strategy could be harmful to the business; both of these platforms cater to specific demographic groups and can give an inflated profile of specific users and the most vocal/negative comments about a business's industry/space.
Moderation and echo chambers
Reddit moderates its pages based on moderators with specific biases.
If a moderator has a specific point of view, they can remove comments of dissenting views and create a false consensus.
A subreddit that solely serves one specific ideology, all users on that subreddit are likely to be hostile when confronting a comment that counters their worldview.
This skews the sample from that subreddit because you are only capturing users who have chosen to join that community based on their beliefs.
People who use a product but don't post on Reddit will not be accounted for.
When presenting your findings to stakeholders be sure to consider the limitations of the sources of findings you have used for your analysis.
Internal data cross-validation
Forum insights should always be viewed as hypotheses rather than absolute truths.
When you take a theme from the forums (e.g. Quora) and use it in your business plan, you will want to validate it externally by checking it against the data you have collected internally.
If a majority of users on Reddit seem to think one particular software bug is a dealbreaker, it’s a good idea to check the support ticket system in your business to see how many users have contacted you about that bug.
After checking your internal support tickets, check your online CRM for any mentions of that bug.
Speak with any sales associates in your company that may have been in contact with customers and ask if they’ve encountered the same concerns from customers.
If you find that your internal data supports the forum insight, then you can have high confidence in using it as a reference for your business activities.
But, if you do not find any correlation between internal and external metrics (i.e. forum and internet data), then those insights are likely limited to a niche, non-representative portion of the internet.
Forum research conclusion
The growing importance of Google integrating forum posts and user-generated content into their search results pages (SERPS) demonstrates the significance of conversational data to your business.
As with other forms of online visibility, forums like Reddit or Quora will continue to be visible and influential in search results but still, provide convenience for businesses.
This does not change the fact that they are two of the largest collections of frustration and inquiry humanity has ever collected.
That being said, while they are important tools for understanding customer sentiment and behavior, these platforms should not be relied upon as the sole means of conducting research within your business.
By treating them as singularly powerful communication channels, you'll be able to create an unparalleled amount of qualitative data that can't be obtained through traditional metrics and customer analytics tools.
Owners and managers of companies that can master these processes will have a significant competitive edge by knowing their customers at a higher level than their customers know themselves.
Most frequently asked questions
Are Quora and Reddit still relevant as forums due to the evolution of Google's algorithm ranking factors?
Yes, even as the algorithmic ranking factors and "What People Are Saying" modules continue to change, they remain two of the most important sources for market research for many reasons.
The research used with this method is not attempting to establish a solid SEO presence, but rather extracting valuable qualitative user information.
Value exists in the ongoing conversations that occur in both forums, regardless of where they show up on Google's SERPs.
How do you eliminate sampling bias in the analysis of the threads?
Sampling bias cannot be completely eliminated from a sample, but controls can be put into place to mitigate it.
It's essential to remember that forums are a small representative segment of the market.
One way to control for sampling bias is to examine recurring themes across multiple different forums.
If a problem is discussed on a beginner subreddit, in an advanced Quora thread, and on a forum in an associated industry, the information will likely reflect the larger market.
What is the biggest mistake marketers make when using these two platforms?
Marketers tend to treat Reddit and Quora as just a place to promote their business, instead of a platform for listening.
Many marketers make the mistake of taking their research and turning it into something that they can promote or share, by inserting links to their websites into an otherwise authentic conversation or discussion within the forum.
Doing so will completely destroy the credibility of the marketer.
The most successful researchers will not attempt to sell anything to the community and instead observe, extract, and utilize the information obtained through the research process within their own company.
Is this method able to replace traditional customer interviews?
No.
A forum-based approach to market research should be used as a supplement to traditional methods, specifically in the area of discovering unknown issues and acquiring user-generated phrases.
The depth of interaction and follow-up questioning found in a true customer interview is not available when relying on a two-year-old anonymously posted Reddit thread.
Utilize forums to develop better and more focused inquiry for your customer interviews.