Survey Media: A Viable Options for Promoting a Survey?

Is social media a viable option for promoting your survey? The growth of social media platforms certainly is enough alone to make you stop and take a look. Facebook has in excess of 840 million subscribers globally and Twitter has approximately 130 million. LinkedIn has over 150 million subscribers in queue. But the fun doesn’t stop there. Social media platforms are the king of the engagement hill. Facebook users spend an average of 23 minutes on the site. This provides plenty of time to view a link to your survey.

Targeting your survey becomes critical when diving into the social media pond. If your bailey wick is consumer market research then Facebook allows you access to ad creation tools that are fairly easy to use and the ability to create ads targeted to specific demographic and geographic segments. You can also target specific phrases and interests (e.g. getting married, looking for a car, single-malt scotch etc.). This targeting ability allows you the flexibility of creating specific survey invitations, in the form of an ad.

LinkedIn has numerous groups which can be used for targeting if your interest is B2B marketing research. You will have to join the group to be able to post, but this is involves a small cost in terms of time. I have used several of the IT-related groups to launch survey invitations and had reasonable success so far.

Social media is not only useful for attracting responses, but also very useful for sharing the results of your survey analysis. Again, following best practice, target your posts to the groups that will have the highest level of interest in your data.

With this very large pond of engaged people what could be wrong with creating a link and promoting your survey through social media channels? The size of the prospect pool is tempting, but when you reach outside of your normal sampling frame you cannot be sure if the results will be generalizable. One of the best ways to assess the contribution social media respondents is to create specific links for each channel and then pass those links back through your online survey tool. On the back-end you will be able to isolate and control for any significant differences based upon sample source.

Social media links can be effective response generators. They can be used for nominal cost and allow for robust segmentation, but should be viewed with caution and diligence.