Looking For New Business Ideas? How To Use The Social Media To Find New Business Ideas
Days are long gone when the social media was just a platform for people to while away profitable time. Don’t get it wrong; it is a still a platform to while away time. Hope that helps? However, it is so much more now. You can use the social media to find new business ideas.
The above is one of the profitable things you can do on the social media. You can get important contacts, make sales, advertise your business, increase your blog visitors, get a job and hire talents. In fact, there seems to be an endless list of what one can do on the social media.
Related: Tips on how to use the social media platforms for customer service
To use the social media to find new business opportunities will require that you dedicate time and resources to the different social media platforms. Some of our tips will be specific to certain platforms while other tips are applicable to all of them.
We will take our time to explain how you can use the social media to find new business ideas and a lot will depend on your ability to improvise and make the best out of the situations you will encounter.
How To Use The Social Media To Find New Business Ideas
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You should search questions in subreddits
Do you know about Reddit? It is the platform you should absolutely visit if you are on the lookout for new tech product or service idea. It is a news and entertainment social media site.
You are expected to surf the subreddits and you will see a reason to smile. How it works is that you are expected to review subreddits and make use of the “Ask me anything” feature. With this, you can ask experts and even celebrities questions that have the potentials to reveal business ideas.
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Check out the comments on Pinterest
The popularity of Pinterest is on the rise. It is an image-based social media platform that provides you with a constant stream of new images that can trigger thinking and creativity and can bring about a new business.
If you want to use the social media to find new business ideas, you must try out Pinterest. Many wedding, home décor, and even fashion trends took off because of the platform.
According to Gail Oliver, “Of all the social media sites, Pinterest is one of the best to see the next hot product trend…. The often-overlooked comments section provides more inspiration for new ideas than some other social media sites. Comments are also visible to everyone, so you can see what people are saying.”
Saige Driver in stating the importance of Pinterest for business ideas stated that “Pinterest recently started to support hashtags on pins, which is a win for both business owners and individuals looking to start a business. You can now plug in a relevant hashtag in the search bar to quickly find relevant pins. You might be able to find popular niche pins that could spark an idea.”
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Check out your competitors
You need an understanding of the industry you would want to be part of. One of the ways to do that is to check out the competitors in the industry. You will need to follow them on various social media platforms so as to see what they share and how they going forward.
According to Reischer, “The trick to using social media to find new ideas and stay on top of the current trends is to monitor your competitors. Read your competitors’ content about the industry and their tweets about new initiatives in their company. Pay attention to the social banter among all participants, and you can begin to assemble a better-informed understanding of the market ecosystem in which you operate.
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Look closely at complaints
This might seem funny but it worth it. I mean, isn’t it boring to keep paying attention to complaints? It might not really be a fun thing but it does pay.
Just like in academic research where you look for a gap in the literature, you can get the gap in product or service delivery by paying close attention to the complaints and frustrations of people and you could fill the gap and you could become a millionaire.
According to Dayne Shuda, “People don’t always know what they want, but they know what frustrations they have. A good indication that you’re on to something as an entrepreneur is when you see a very common frustration. Social media provides the ability to observe this like nothing before in history.”
When you notice a common frustration, you can take it further by visiting forums so as to determine the market facing the problem you intend to fix. When there is, then you can come up with a solution and voila, there is a business to run.
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Check out trends
Daily, you will have to go through your news feed so it is up to you to determine what you want to see. You will need to be cognitive of what you see and check out trends. This is one of the ways to use the social media to find new business ideas.
Lilia Karimi recommended that “people take a closer look at their news feeds and see if it’s motivating and inspiring them, and if not, [decide] what they would like to see more of”
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Look for hashtags and keywords
When you search for hashtags and keywords that that resonates with ideas that you are interested in and passionate about, you could find things that will bring about a new business idea.
According to Deborah Sweeney of MyCorporation, you should “Consider the following key hashtags on Instagram that are relevant for your particular industry. Doing this allows you to discover what your target audience is talking about [and] uncover new trending topics too.”
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Hook up with Facebook groups and pages
This is simple but very productive. There are so many groups and pages on Facebook that you can join or like respectively. Important things can be shared there that will get you thinking and new business ideas can spring up from there.
You need to find and join some groups and like some pages that are relevant to the industry you want to become part of. This is one of the ways to see people’s complaints and frustrations and then, come up with something that can solve that.
It is a place where you will see producers, consumers, and competitors all having their say and giving you something to learn from.
