No agency, no survey, no wait: Tapping into the world's largest focus group on social
Editor's note: This article is an automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity. For the full session, please watch the recording.
Surveys, a great method for some research projects, do not always get to the heart of the problem because you need to know the questions to ask before sending a survey.
Mya Achidov, product and content marketing lead at dig, speaks to an experience she had where after the survey she ran came back, she wished she could add one more question. In a Quirk’s Virtual Sessions – DIY Research presentation on September 24, 2026, Achidov suggested a way to fix this drawback of surveys.
Anchidov suggested social listening on Social Media platforms as a great preliminary way to find out what consumers are already saying, leading to better survey questions later. She used three brands to help illustrate why this is a great solution, Klarna, US Fertility and Kiko Milano.
Session transcript
Joe Rydholm
Hi everybody, and welcome to our presentation, “No Agency, No Survey, No Wait. Tap into the world's largest focus group on social.” I'm Quirks Editor, Joe Rydholm. Thanks for joining us today.
Just a quick reminder that you can use a chat tab if you'd like to interact with other attendees during today's discussion, and you can use a Q&A tab to submit questions to the presenter, and we'll get to as many as we have time for in the Q&A portion at the end.
Mya, take it away.
Mya Achidov
Thanks, Joe. Good morning, everyone, and thank you so much for joining me here today, especially so early in the morning.
I'm Maya, and I lead the product and content marketing at Dig.
For those of you who aren't familiar with us, Dig is a video first social intelligence platform. We help enterprise brands and governments understand authentic human reactions, shaping perception across social.
Now, before we get into it, I want to kind of set the stage for what I'm going to be talking about today.
Most of you here are in insights or our CMK professionals, so I know you have all the methods in the world, the trackers, the segmentation studies, the UNA studies, the focus groups, the syndicated data, you name it. I know you're not short on the methods, that's not the problem. But what you're probably short on, and I think that this is something a lot of us can relate to, is time and budget.
Sometimes the challenge when it comes to research is figuring out what questions you should even be asking in the first place. And so essentially what I want to explore with you today is how we can use these conversations that are already happening online to discover things we might not have even thought to even ask about in the first place and how that can help you guys get more out of the research you're already doing.
So, here's what we're going to cover today.
First, I want to show you why social video is such an interesting source of consumer insights and what we might miss when we're only looking at written text or captions or even sentiment scores. Essentially, what can video tell us that we might not be getting from our existing sources of information?
We're also going to look at three real brands from three completely different categories. I chose Klarna, US Fertility and Kiko Milano, which is an Italian makeup brand. And I deliberately chose brands from different categories because I want to show you how much you can actually learn from social conversations at scale, whether you're analyzing a few hundred posts or a few thousand posts. And I'll walk you through what we found and what surprised us and the questions that came up from those findings.
And finally, I'm going to leave you with a few takeaways for how you can apply this to your own research.
I do want to preface one thing before we start. This isn't going to be a product demo. Everything I'm showing you today came out of our own platform, so it's all one method applied to three very different categories. And we're going to focus on the insights themselves and how we found them and what you can actually do with those insights.
Let me start with a personal example before we get really into it.
A few years ago actually, I was working on an annual report and part of that involved putting together a survey. I spent a lot of time writing the questions. I even sent them to different stakeholders to get their feedback. I wanted to make sure we weren't missing anything. And by the time we finalized the survey, I felt really good about it.
I thought we'd nailed all the right questions, but then once the survey was done and I started to look at the results, I remember thinking that I wish I'd asked this one other question. And the frustrating part was that I couldn't go back and fix it. The survey was already done, the responses were already in, and that one missing question could have actually given us a much better understanding of what we were looking at. And that's essentially the challenge with surveys.
A survey answers the question you already had. You had to know what to ask before you started, and it helps you confirm something or understand how widespread a particular opinion is. But what about the questions that you didn't even think to ask?
And that's where I think social media can be really valuable. People are already sharing their experiences, their frustrations, opinions and recommendations. They're talking about products, brands, asking questions, explaining why they made certain decisions and they're doing all of it without us having them to ask anything.
Now, I want to just be clear that I'm not against surveys at all. They do their job, but looking at myself, I'd imagine if I had looked at those conversations before writing my survey, I might have discovered that missing question before it was too late.
So, essentially social can be a really great preliminary first step in your research, and it can help you discover what might be worth asking before you invest all of this time and budget in another study.
And more and more of those conversations that we're seeing on social are actually happening through video.
As you can see in 2025, we found that actually more than half of social conversations are on video. We're actually kind of verifying this internally right now for 2026, but the number has also jumped even more than that.
And I mean, just think about how you use social media yourself. When you want to know whether a product actually works, you might watch someone try it on TikTok or when you're researching a purchase, you might look at a YouTube review or when something goes wrong, you might find a video on Instagram of somebody sharing their experience. But here's where I think it gets really interesting.