Hugh Carling
Co-founder of Liveminds. I love to bring like-minded people together. Whether that's growing businesses, running online communities, staging events or captaining my village cricket team, nothing makes me happier than seeing people with a shared passion, coming together and making the most of it.
The explorative nature of qualitative research makes social media networks the perfect environments to test reactions, recruit participants and engage with consumers online. Here are three of the most effective ways to use social media for qual research online:
1. Listen to social media conversations
Social media monitoring provides a useful starting point for projects by highlighting trends or themes and defining a common lexicon. It also allows for more detailed exploration into brand positioning, engagement and the effectiveness of communication strategies. These data can then be translated into meaningful insights and help to emphasise potential opportunities.
2. Use Behavioural Recruitment
We use Behavioural Recruitment™ to recruit fresh research participants that genuinely match any criteria, from two billion Facebook users in 190 countries. We find them based on extremely detailed insights on their real interests and behaviours, rather than relying on their own reported data. Then we screen them in a thorough 3-step process to ensure you get the best possible people for your project.
Behavioural Recruitment finds the genuine, fresh and engaged participants that are one of the most important ingredients in any research project.
3. Engage easily and effectively
Facebook is where your participants are and want to be. It’s the best place to get them truly engaged in your online research and the best way to keep them engaged over time. The instantly familiar comments tool, used by hundreds of millions of people every day, makes it easy for participants to interact happily.
Liveminds can seamlessly channel the best participants from your Facebook communities into a more controlled environment for in-depth qual, they simply click a link and log straight in. The convenience and ease of Facebook makes it the perfect home for your long-term communities allowing you to keep participants actively engaged over time with minimal effort.
Liveminds recently helped to shape Sony’s social content strategy using Facebook to engage participants.
To find out more about how you, or your clients can benefit from using Facebook to recruit and engage consumers for qualitative research, please get in touch.
