Using Social Media Comments for Audience Research

When I research a niche, the comment section under a popular video is often more useful than the video itself. People ask the questions they actually have, complain about what’s missing, and recommend alternatives. The problem is that reading those comments in the app is painful: infinite scroll, replies collapsed behind “view more”, and no way to search.

What I do now

1. Pick 5–10 top videos for a topic on TikTok, Instagram or YouTube.
2. Paste each link into Comment Viewer, which loads every public comment and reply in one list (nested replies included).
3. Export to CSV and drop everything into a spreadsheet.
4. Tag comments by theme: questions, complaints, feature requests, praise.

Why it works

• Questions repeated across several videos are a strong signal for content ideas.
• Complaints about existing products are basically a free feature list.
• The exact phrases people use make good headline and FAQ wording.

Half an hour of this beats most keyword tools when you want to understand how real people talk about a topic.