Using Social Media for Market Research: Gain Insights Into Guest Preference

What do tourists love most about your destination? What do guests wish your hotel offered? Which brand are they most likely to choose over yours? For hospitality brands, understanding guest preferences is crucial. But this process doesn’t have to involve guesswork. In many cases, you can rely on social media for market research.

When you monitor the right social media data, you can learn what guests think about your destination, property, or any other travel-related topic. From social listening to hashtag research to guest surveys, the right social media platform offers tons of opportunities for market research.

Want to jump right in and start exploring our powerful social listening and hashtag research tools? Sign up for a free trial of Agorapulse and set up your first search in minutes.

Why Hospitality Brands Need Social Media Market Research

Market research is crucial for analyzing guest behavior, industry trends, and the competitive landscape. And for travel and hospitality brands, social media is the ideal channel for market research efforts.

After all, social media is the top place tourists look for travel inspiration.

In fact, 75% of people get inspired to travel to a certain destination after seeing it on social media.

Here are just a few ways hospitality brands can benefit from using social media for market research.

Understand guest preferences and sentiment

Does it seem like guests have become more demanding in recent years? With market research, you can avoid having to guess what they prefer or how they really feel about your destination or property.

Asking questions directly is just one possible approach. With the right market research tools, you can also find user-generated content (UGC) featuring your brand and assess the sentiment behind the content.

Spot relevant trends

Have your target audience’s preferences shifted over time? Are they looking for services or amenities your brand doesn’t offer yet?

When you monitor trends, you can better understand what guests look for. Then you can introduce new offerings efficiently and continue to delight your target market.

Monitor brand reputation

Is your brand reputation as positive as you’d like it to be? Or have recent events caused it to decline?

Market research reveals how your target audience perceives your brand due to factors like pricing, values, and image. These insights also help you make data-driven decisions about how to adjust your brand’s positioning or messaging.

Evaluate your competition

Are your competitors rolling out new services or amenities that could prompt your loyal customers to choose the competition over your brand? Or are they facing brand reputation issues that might dissuade guests?

With the right market research tool, you can monitor competitors almost as easily as you can track your own brand. Then you can identify areas where your brand can win.

Gain real-time feedback

Travel and hospitality brands have a long list of options for market research methods. For example, you could email surveys, create focus groups, or interview guests.

However, these options take time to organize and execute. One of the biggest benefits of using social media for market research is that it can provide actionable feedback within minutes rather than weeks or months.

Make data-driven marketing decisions 

What kind of social media content should your brand prioritize this quarter? What type of campaign is most likely to help your team meet key performance indicators (KPIs)?

There’s no need to guess. Market research tools provide quantitative data that can drive marketing decisions and guide your strategy in the right direction.

How to Start Doing Marketing Research on Social Media

If you’re new to social listening and hashtag research, start here. Otherwise, skip ahead to our advanced tips.

1. Ask guests what they like and dislike about your property or destination

Your reservation data can tell you a lot about what guests like or dislike about your hotel property or tourist destination. Yet this information doesn’t provide much nuance.

The data reveals which rooms drive the most bookings or which parts of your destination get the most visitors. But it doesn’t tell you why guests choose them over other options.

One way to dig deeper is to ask guests directly. You can always create your own DIY poll in any social media caption. However, many social media networks have built-in polling tools.

For example, Instagram polls and Stories allow polls with up to four options. You can also add polls to any text post on X. In this @visitmusiccity X post, the official account for Nashville, Tennessee, asks followers to share their favorite way to spend a Saturday evening in the city.

And in this @visitflorida X post, the state’s tourism board asks followers to choose between two sides of Florida.

Based on the poll results, you might get inspired to ask even more detailed questions next time. After all, the more you know about guest preferences, the more you can cater to their likes (and avoid their dislikes).

It’s important to note that these polls may respond to a relatively small sample size. Consider sharing them across social media channels or in different formats (e.g. Stories) to attract more responses.

2. Figure out which services and amenities guests want next

Polls and surveys can also give insight into the amenities that guests want your property or destination to offer next. For example, you could ask guests whether they would take advantage of room service before you make plans to roll it out.

But there’s a catch. To use polls or surveys this way, you’ll need to know which services or amenities to ask followers about.

To get new ideas from your target market, use social listening. With Agorapulse’s social media listening tool, you can set up searches for your brand across Facebook, Instagram, X, and the web.

In addition to finding brand mentions, these searches can also track branded hashtags on Instagram and X and brand names or other keywords on X and across the web.

Then your listening dashboard will automatically display all relevant conversations about your brand. You can scroll through the listening feed to browse the posts and look for common themes.

For example, you might find that room service isn’t exactly top-of-mind for your guests. Instead, you might learn that what they really want is a great breakfast buffet.

Try Agorapulse’s social listening tool

3. Discover how guests really feel about your brand with social media for market research

Do guests have a positive, neutral, or negative impression of your brand? How has their perception changed over time? And how has this affected your brand reputation?

With social listening, monitoring your brand is relatively easy. Agorapulse automatically provides sentiment analysis for every social listening search so you can quickly gauge how guests feel.

Our social listening dashboard also provides a comparative analysis that shows how sentiment has changed over time. You can take steps to correct it if necessary.

Curious about what’s driving all that positive sentiment? On your dashboard, filter out all other sentiments. Then scroll through all the positive content and look for common themes.

With Agorapulse’s social listening dashboard, you can also analyze sentiment by content format or social network. You can get an even more nuanced view of conversations about your brand.

4. Find travel-related trends your audience cares about

Not every travel trend is a good fit for your brand or your audience. But when you want to delight guests and stay ahead of the competition, it’s important to know which trends your audience truly cares about.

For example, this co-branded Instagram Reel by @findingfiona__ and @cosmopolitan_lv features a mother-daughter trip. The comment section is filled with followers expressing interest in taking their mothers on a similar trip—a travel trend the hotel could pursue.

One way to monitor top trends efficiently is to create a social listening search. With Agorapulse, you can monitor hashtags and keywords to get a broader view of your target audience’s preferences. In other words, you can listen in on conversations that don’t necessarily mention your brand.

Since Agorapulse shows search volume over time, you’ll easily see whether interest in the trend has increased or decreased over time. Then use the data to decide whether the trend is worth investment.

For example, 49% of tourists seek photo-worthy destinations when deciding where to travel. This insight might prompt you to learn how important photo ops are for your audience—or how much they value beautiful views.

Another way to conduct market research is to experiment with trends. When you add relevant hashtags to Instagram content, Agorapulse automatically tracks the total interactions.

See how many interactions each trend-related hashtag generated. And if you use the hashtag multiple times, you can see the average number of interactions. You can also compare different hashtags to see which ones truly resonate with your audience.

5. Identify influencers your target market trusts

Branded content and ads can certainly help your hospitality brand reach and attract potential guests. But in many cases, influencers are even more effective at capturing guests’ attention and building trust.

81% of consumers report considering a purchase after seeing a social media post from an influencer, friend, or family member. 69% trust influencers, friends, and family over brands.

To start your influencer research, use a social listening tool to monitor brand mentions. Pay attention to the accounts that mention your brand. When you find a social media influencer, do a deep dive to learn about their niche, style, and audience. Then decide if the influencer is likely to be a good partner for your brand.

Next, take a step back and broaden your scope. Use the same method to find influencers who mention your competitors and your niche. Get to know them before reaching out about a brand partnership.

Advanced Tips to Leverage Social Media for Market Research

From competitive benchmarking to inbox analysis, use these advanced tips to get even more value from your social media data.

1. Learn how to speak your audience’s language

The more you know about your followers, the better you can communicate with them on social media. Over time, your social team can build trust with your target audience—and even convert them into guests.

To speak your audience’s language, first, you need to know what they say. To do this, monitor your social inbox and brand mentions and look for common themes. For example, you might find that your audience constantly raves about your destination’s museums or your hotel’s event spaces.

To understand how your audience speaks about your brand, pay attention to the language they use in comments, DMs, and UGC. Do they use certain words, hashtags, or emojis?

Finally, make sure you understand where your audience talks about your brand. With Agorapulse’s social reports and social listening dashboard, you can analyze engagement per social channel.

Then use these insights to guide your social media captions and comments, including which social channels to prioritize.

2. Create more relevant responses for followers 

Receiving a lot of social media engagement can be a good thing. After all, responding to comments and DMs lets you connect with your audience and turn followers into guests.

Yet managing a busy social inbox can be overwhelming, especially for small teams. When you know how to speak your audience’s language, however, you can create saved replies that resonate with your target market.

Then you can reuse them again and again, saving your team tons of time in the long run.

With Agorapulse, create saved replies for any connected account and customize them for different social profiles. Insert personalization (e.g., followers’ first names) automatically to add a special touch while still responding efficiently.

3. Make a bigger impact with your social media for market research

Creating social media content your audience doesn’t care about won’t help you meet your KPIs or provide value to your followers. So, how can you maximize the impact of your social content?

One way is to ask followers what content they want to see on your social channels. You can use in-app features like polls and surveys, or you can ask followers to leave comments.

In this @visitcalifornia Instagram Story, the state’s tourism board uses an emoji slider to prompt followers to express interest in the featured destination. The brand can use the results to inform future content.

In this @vegas X post, the tourism board asks followers to weigh in on who they think will win that evening’s UFC event. Because the poll provides real-time results, the brand can use it to guide content throughout the event.

In many cases, you can also use analytics to guide your brand’s social media strategy. With Agorapulse’s social media reports, you can quickly spot top-performing content for any connected account.

Our social reports also reveal the best post type to publish based on engagement or reach. You can use this data to inform your content calendar and create social posts that are more likely to resonate with followers.

Plus, our social media ROI reports reveal the channels, profiles, campaigns, and content that drive the most transactions and revenue. You can use this data to create content that drives more reservations and revenue.

Measure Your Social ROI With Agorapulse

4. See how your brand measures up to the competition

It’s crucial to monitor your own brand on social media. But you shouldn’t stop there. It’s just as important to know how you measure up to the competition.

With Agorapulse’s competitor benchmark tool, you can see how your brand compares to any other Facebook or Instagram profile. It automatically compares profiles based on followers, number of posts, total engagement, and average engagement.

Our competitor benchmark dashboard identifies top content across all competitors. It’s helpful for getting new content ideas and seeing which formats work best for other brands in your space.

This dashboard also tracks audience growth trends. As a result, it can provide valuable insights into what drives growth for the competition.

5. Refine your brand’s positioning and messaging

The more you know about your competition’s strategy and your guests’ preferences, the better you can refine your brand’s positioning and messaging. Make data-driven decisions about these essential elements with market research.

Competitive research and social listening allow you to position your brand uniquely and set it apart from other brands in the space.

Social listening and hashtag research help you understand how to talk about your brand in a way that speaks to guests’ pain points and taps into their emotions.

Wrapping Up  Leveraging Social Media for Market Research

Using social media for market research provides invaluable insights about your audience, industry, and competition. With the right tools, you can collect and analyze data efficiently and use it to inform everything from how you communicate with guests to whether you introduce new amenities.

Ready to see how Agorapulse can simplify your team’s social listening, hashtag research, and competitive benchmarking? Sign up for a free 30-day trial (no credit card required) and try Agorapulse for yourself.