Social Media - A Researcher's Wet Dream!

Over the last couple of years it’s become apparent that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter don’t solely act as a way for people to create their own and join other social networks.  Every online profile that’s created by the respective user holds a wealth of information about both themselves and other people within their on and offline social circles and it is because of this that many companies have been turning to social media for Market Research.

Facebook is an example of one such social media platform that’s been greatly targeted by large companies wishing to gain further knowledge as to how they can advertise and push their products more effectively onto the public.  Admittedly I have to say that I don’t fully agree with this, however I recently learned that research in social media is not just being utilised by large corporate companies looking for ways to squeeze more money out of the unsuspecting consumer.

A number of weeks ago I attended a lecture given by Salford University PhD Student, Charlie Mydlarz who has been using the social media platforms , ‘Facebook’, ‘Twitter’ and ‘WordPress’ to help research and develop his ‘Sound Around You’ project.  This project is a large scale sonic research survey into the relationships of the public with the soundscapes that they inhabit.  If you like the sound of this – no pun intended, please visit his website, www.soundaroundyou.com

The research stages of the ‘Sound Around You’ and many other academic projects can be greatly enhanced with the use of social media.  It can allow researchers to target much larger/global audiences so that huge amounts of information can be recorded in extremely short periods of time when compared to research that’s conducted via face-to-face interaction.  It can also allow researchers to aim their research at certain social demographics with great ease and at a lower cost which could in  turn lead to new ways of working which stray away from traditional methods.

For example, Ray Poynter[1] a director at Virtual Surveys says,

‘ Facebook Polling is a new way to find out quick answers to simple questions. Users log in, type a simple question, specify a geographic location and a sample size, pays as little as 51 US dollars (for 100 interviews) and the results start flowing in.

These polls are clearly not going to replace U&A or ad-trackers, but they could spawn new ways of working. Traditionally, we have expected everything to be designed before the research begins, but often the basic assumptions were wrong.

With Facebook Polling, the first step could be to spend 200-300 US dollars asking a series of questions over a couple of days, refining the scope of the problem, and answering some queries on the way.’

However although there seem to be some great advantages in using social media in research, there are also a number of possible disadvantages.  Although various social media platforms are used by millions of people all over the globe, there are still large groups of people who don’t use them and are not prepared to divulge their personal information over the internet.  This suggests that only certain types of research would benefit from social media and that the research stages of many projects would still need to use a combination of both traditional and newer social media research methods.

I hope that you found this post interesting and not too boring, either way please feel free to leave comments.

Peace

References:

1. Poynter.R (2007).How to use Facebook For Market Research.[ONLINE](Updated Oct 4 2007). Available at: http://www.utalkmarketing.com/Pages/Article.aspx?ArticleID=3065&Title=How_to_use_Facebook_for_Market_Research.%5BAccessed Nov 2010]

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