What Would You Ask The World’s Largest Focus Group?

Most brands know that understanding their consumers is vitally important for creating successful strategies, products, and campaigns.

But during a global pandemic, this can be a challenge.

Consumer behavior is changing fast, and demand for different products and services is continuously changing. It’s a massive challenge for brands to navigate the current landscape and discover what consumers really want in real-time.

Traditional market research methods like focus groups can be expensive, slow, and labor-intensive. And when researchers are under pressure to deliver insights quickly, the results these methods produce just can’t keep up.

Brands need research solutions that will help them to understand their consumers quickly and at scale. That’s why at Brandwatch we’ve been busy building what we call the world’s largest focus group – a feature called Social Panels.

Social Panels is an audience research feature that helps brands find groups of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people based on specific criteria, enabling researchers to analyze their conversations both broadly and on specific topics.

It’s helpful to think of the feature as giving access to virtual focus groups that are always available to provide insight on any topic. In essence, Social Panels offers an up-to-date alternative to traditional panel research that’s fit for the 21st century.

To get started, users simply:

• Search for focus group panelists using a range of different criteria, including gender, location, bio keyword, and profession. You can find vegan students in New Hampshire or Harley Davidson fans in Bogota! You also have the option to upload a list of authors from outside the platform.
• Once you’ve saved your Social Panel you’ll start to see all the conversations these users are taking part in right now, and all the conversations they’ve had historically. Analysts can explore the key topics, opinions, and brands mentioned amongst this group of people to discover important insights.

 

To give you a flavor of what can be found using Social Panels, here are eight insights we discovered using the feature:

1. The chef that vegans want you to know about

When exploring which chefs vegans are rating right now, we were surprised to discover that it wasn’t any of the celebrity and TV chefs that often dominate social media. Instead, it was 12-year-old Omari McQueen. As the top-mentioned chef in vegans’ conversations, he’s definitely the flavor of the month.

 

 

Conversation has a predominantly positive sentiment, as vegans celebrate the young chef publishing his first vegan cookbook.

 

2. What show will theatre fans be rushing to see when Broadway reopens?

Having won 11 Tony Awards and 7 Oliviers, it’s no secret that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is a fan favorite. Despite coming out five years ago, the musical has had an unexpected surge in online interest during lockdown. It’s the show that theatre fans are most excited about seeing once Broadway returns.

 

 

At present, all performances of Hamilton on Broadway are canceled until January 2021, but expect this show to be a sell-out when it returns!

 

3. The brand that’s got all the beauty bloggers talking

Rihanna has proven time and time again that she is a woman of many talents. From taking over the world as a pop icon, to appearing alongside the likes of Jim Parsons and Cara Delevingne in movies, Rihanna has taught us that there is no goal too big. Her latest venture has been no exception.

When we delved into the conversation of beauty bloggers worldwide, it was Rihanna’s cosmetics brand Fenty Beauty that came out on top, dominating the conversation.

 

 

Beauty bloggers are particularly complimentary about the wide range of foundation shades available and praise Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty brand for creating wearable, long-lasting, inclusive products.

 

4. The fitness habits that sports fans are loving

When analyzing online conversations coming from sports fans, we were interested to see what fitness habits were popular during lockdown.

We were quite surprised by what we found.

 

 

Yoga, pilates, and meditation were the most popular exercise habits of sports fans during lockdown. Other notable mentions included running and hiking, but what’s interesting is that lots of these activities were discussed in tandem with words like ‘mindfulness’ and ‘wellbeing’. Many stated that they liked to exercise in the morning as part of their daily routine.

It’s great to see that sports fans around the world are taking care of both mind and body.

 

5. The secret to navigating life as a new parent

Changing diapers, frequent feeding, and sleepless nights are all certainties when becoming a new parent. Along with the amazing joy that a little one can bring, it’s natural for new parents to develop habits (or vices) that help them deal with the complexity of this big life change. Using Social Panels, we discovered one of the most popular indulgences of new mums and dads – iced coffee.

 

New parents around the world are enjoying a cool, caffeinated beverage to help them relax, unwind, and keep up.

 

6. How do college students in the US feel about going back to school?

As we head into fall, schools and colleges around the world are starting to regain a little more normality. We wanted to understand how college students in the United States feel about returning to the classroom.

When we examined the back to school conversation amongst college students in the US, the overwhelming emotion in the conversation was sadness.

 

 

When analyzing the mentions, we found that this was mostly due to the prospect of more online classes.

Interestingly, joy was the secondary emotion that this group of US college students expressed. Many new students have recently been accepted to the colleges of their choice and are pleased to start school this semester. In addition, returning students have complained of home life becoming unbearable over lockdown, so returning to school is looking even more appealing to them.

It will be interesting to track this group as virtual classes become the norm to see how emotions change over time.

 

7. Top trends for graphic designers 

We wanted to understand what designs were trending, so we built a Social Panel of graphic designers from all over the world to find out what was sparking conversation online.

Turns out, it’s minimalistic typography.

This was the most popular conversation amongst our group of designers, with many expressing a need for brands to tone it down and go back to basics with their fonts.

Many graphic designers in the group were also very vocal about the fonts that they are not enjoying.

 

 

This is a lesson to brands everywhere to make smart font choices – the designers are watching you.

 

8. Everybody in LA is talking about this artist

When it comes to celebrities and trendsetting, LA is a pretty good place to look for what’s happening. We created a Social Panel made up of LA residents to understand what they’re currently talking about.

It turns out Cardi B is a hugely popular topic amongst these Los Angeles locals. The main topic of conversation? Her latest song, WAP.

Not only has the internet been dominated by posts about the music video (which features celebrities including LA-based Kylie Jenner), WAP has also been a sensation on TikTok with many creators attempting to pull out their most impressive high kicks and splits!

 

If you’d like to know what your consumers are talking about, book a demo with Brandwatch today.