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Surveys & Social Media

Our AMA webinar, Surveys & Social Media: Learn How and Why You Should Incorporate Twitter into Your Survey Research, described how you can integrate social media into each step of your survey research process:

1. Study Design--Use social media to frame your hypothesis. Read blog posts and tweets related to the market you are researching to develop a better understanding of it: blogsearch.google.com and search.twitter.com are useful tools for this. Be on the lookout for sponsored posts, spam and other inauthentic content.
2. Sample Selection--Identify potential respondents. When using blogs for market research, Josephine Hansom, a social researcher with GfK NOP, advocates contacting bloggers to discuss their posts and to ask them questions related to the specific issues you are researching. Describing her 2009 ESOMAR ORC presentation, Bloggers as Research Partners, I wrote:

The online persona does not always reflect the offline persona; remember the bloggers' potential motivations and concerns about privacy and security. Bloggers merit a reciprocal relationship. When using blogs as research data, recognize the impact of the audience and interaction on what the blogger is sharing. Engage by acquiring bloggers as sample, eavesdrop to analyze online statements, and connect in order to understand context of what is being shared, meeting bloggers half way; only then can we authenticate the opinions being shared online.

3. Questionnaire Design--
• Learn the language of respondents. Discovering how people talk about the issues you are researching can help you improve the quality of the questions you write. See Voice of the Customer Spoken Here for an example of "translating" a question from the sponsor's language to the customer's language.
• Develop comprehensive choice lists. Closed-ended questions are often used so that you can easily extrapolate to the target population; unfortunately, short choice lists often lead to wrong answers. You want to develop as comprehensive a list of choices as possible. One way to do this is to use social media to see the reasons people are giving for certain actions. For instance, I reviewed tweets about the Atkins Diet to determine the primary reasons people had for avoiding or abandoning the diet: some dieters are uninterested in Atkins because of a love of pasta and bread, a sweet tooth, distaste for red meat, concerns about heart disease or belief it is an unproven fad. These reasons then informed a choice list for the question "In the past, why have you thought the Atkins Diet was not right for you?"
4. Fielding the Survey--
• Invite respondents by Twitter. You can certainly publish a link to a survey and invite people to take it. Important caveats: the result is a convenience sample and isn't representative of anyone other than the people who responded; social media sampling reaches that part of your audience on social media, an audience that will likely differ in key ways from non-users, depending on source. 
• Use tweets to trigger survey invitations. Sometimes 140 characters of feedback just doesn't provide enough context. Major B2C brands should consider soliciting additional feedback by inviting Twitter users to complete short surveys that provide structured detail about their experiences (for instance, what retail outlet they were at, which precise product was being discussed, etc.).
5. Analysis--Add tweets for color commentary. Since too many open-ended questions prompt respondents to abandon surveys, you often lack the qualitative comments that you want when reviewing survey results. Consider supplementing surveys with Twitter analysis as in this case study of fleshing out a quantitative poll with a qualitative analysis from social media.

Infusing social media insights into the survey process can help you to produce higher quality research.