Editor’s note: Darren Bosik is senior methodologist at QuestBack, a Bridgeport, Conn., research firm.
Here’s a New Year’s resolution every market researcher should make: Embrace social media as a viable resource for panelists and insights.
There’s no refuting that social media has grown to a ubiquitous platform for consumer conversations about brands and their experiences with products and services. In the U.S., Pew Research reported almost three-quarters of U.S. adult Internet users (73 percent) now use a social networking site. And some 42 percent of online adults in the country now use multiple social networks. This makes it possible to conduct market research with an audience that is many times larger than nearly any other marketing or media source can provide.
That’s why social media has had a profound effect on traditional methods for recruiting research panelists. As we’ll discuss in our upcoming Webinar, researchers, however, should tread cautiously when tapping into social networks for new panelists. The impact of social media on traditional research panels likely comes down to willingness of researchers to blend the feedback occurring across Facebook, Twitter and other platforms with those of traditional, structured survey development. There is a lot to be learned from social media conversations and many of these findings can often validate the insights from surveys and other quant studies.
Integrating social media into the traditional research model will involve recruiting social media users into the panel environment. It’s clear that panelist recruitment and retention have become more challenging in the last few years as there is now competition within the research industry to recruit and keep panelists. The same consumers often belong to multiple panels and also join and then quickly leave panels in search of the most rewarding incentives. There is increasing panelist fatigue as researchers send multiple surveys to single panelists to keep costs in check. The result has been higher panelist attrition rates.
Part of blending social media into traditional panel involves three critical components:
River sampling. River sampling recruits research respondents using banner and pop-up ads from a variety of social media sites. It is an online sampling method that drives potential respondents to an online portal where they are screened for studies in real-time. Qualified respondents are then randomly assigned to a survey. It involves placing banners, ads or promotions on a variety of Web sites so that people will click on them and subsequently complete a survey. The identity of the potential responders is unknown, just as their demographics and psychographics are unknown.
Facebook integration. The real payoff to establishing a Facebook presence comes when you deploy a feedback-based strategy that engages your fan base regularly through what we call a Facebook feedback loop – a systematic way of routinely collecting insights about your Facebook fans and leveraging the data to improve brand health and market share. By interacting with social communities on the Facebook platform, you can build a dialogue that helps paint a more vivid picture of who among your fans are the true brand loyalists. You can even invite your fans to become members to a research panel and take surveys while they are still on the Facebook page.
Quality assurance and business rules. Although social media presents an opportunity to sample from a larger and more diverse audience than with online panels alone, it also has a drawback: quality. There is some concern that recruiting from social media sites can create a misrepresentative sample of panel participants. Evaluating the effectiveness of social media as a sample source requires implementing stringent panel quality rules, such as RIM weighting and projection factors.
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Social media can provide a welcome source for new panelists. The primary way to improve panel quality is to expand panel recruitment sources to reach a more diverse base. Doing so will reduce industry competition for panelists. One means to expand recruitment is to solicit consumers to participate in panels via mobile devices and tablets. Another is to blend several recruitment sources that may include traditional, double-opt-in panelists, river sampling and social media.
In addition to panel recruitment, social media can provide almost instant analysis about new product ideas, brand awareness and consumer sentiment. Traditional qualitative market research methods, such as focus groups, are still required to validate what is being said across social networks. But by dipping initially into social conversations you can set the tone for more rigorous follow-up marketing efforts.