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Similarly, quantitative research in the form of statistically significant surveys can be most helpful. Keep in mind that you must run surveys at regular intervals to get valuable, statistically significant results. The reason is that influence changes more rapidly in an online environment, and the social media platforms on which people participate change, too. Don’t run extensive surveys irregularly. Run short, quick surveys about your audiences on a frequent basis to glean important insights.

Pay attention to where you run the surveys, too, because that can affect the results. A good strategy is to run the survey on your corporate website but simultaneously use a third-party survey vendor to run the same survey on the social media platforms. This way, you’re gauging how people participate and socialize in their own contexts. Very often, the quantitative research can give statistically significant results about influence, with the qualitative research being used to explain the hows and whys of the responses. The two kinds of research go hand in hand.

Some of the survey vendors that you can use include

 SurveyMonkey (www.surveymonkey.com); see Figure 2-11

 Zoomerang (www.zoomerang.com)

 SurveyGizmo (www.surveygizmo.com)

 Key Survey (www.keysurvey.com)

FIGURE 2-11: SurveyMonkey.

As you may know, there are other important forms of research, such as content, discourse, and network analysis, which take on additional importance in the sphere of social media, but those can be relatively laborious. Generally, they’re appropriate only when much deeper behavioral insights are required.