Abstract:

Most current social media research is based on topics, not people. You don’t know WHO is doing the talking, so you don’t know WHAT is relevant to your target consumer or business challenge. Our research approach created a hybrid of two existing methods—social listening and survey research—as a fresh approach to solve for this challenge. By layering specific people-attributes onto individual level social data we identify the WHO in the social space, and then can create target-specific social listening communities for ongoing insight generation. The approach can be repeated on a regular basis with refreshed social data without repeating the survey, thereby lowering the cost of developing a longitudinal perspective and allowing for a higher return on research investment.