bEST PRAcTIcES

ENGAGING YOUR PANEL THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA

A PRACTICAL HOw-TO GUIDE
Laura Davies, SVP Panel Strategy & Innovation

INTRODUCTION

The advent of social media presents both challenges and opportunities for Community Panels, and is a force that cannot be ignored. At Vision Critical, we have been experimenting with these new channels both in terms of the opportunities for panel recruitment and for panel engagement. This article focuses on the latter and draws from the work we have been doing in our National Panels Division to experiment with using social media as a supplemental means to engage members of the Angus Reid Forum (Canada), Springboard America and Springboard UK. We chose to pursue two channels in terms of social media: Facebook and Twitter. Based on our experience to date, this series focuses on providing a practical overview of what we did and the how-to weve learned so far when it comes to using these particular media to engage your Community Panel.

FACEbOOk
www.facebook.com

Facebook opened to anyone over 13 in 2006, having started as a site aimed at Harvard students, and today boasts over 500 million active members globally. Users create a personal profile about themselves, including a Wall onto which others can post messages, and the ability to link themselves to others who mutually agree to be connected as friends. It also includes an internal messaging system akin to email, and alerts based on actions done by friends on Facebook. Members can form groups based on shared interests around almost any subject, or in relation to schools, workplaces, organizations, brands or campaigns. They can keep up with content posted by friends, or status changes they make, through a News Feed which aggregates these updates into one stream.

TwITTER
www.twitter.com

Twitter arrived on the scene in 2007, and about 175 million have registered for this micro-blogging service, with about 370,000 new people joining each day. Its mini-updates are intended primarily to answer the question what are you doing? (I.e. real-time status updates related to current activities, interests, personal or work-life) in 140 characters or less. It also enables individuals to share their views on trending topics (albeit in a highly concise form), and to share links to other items online like blog posts or articles. Its direct message feature also mimics a form of instant messaging.

IN THIS WHITE PAPER SERIES:

Part One: Why Use Social Media to engage Your Panel? Part tWO: Setting Up a Facebook Page and a twitter account Part three: Ongoing Maintenance and engagement Part FOUr: tools of the trade

New York, London, Vancouver, San Francisco, Paris, Sydney, Toronto, Chicago

www.visioncritical.com
Vision Critical 2011. All rights reserved.

ENGAGING YOUR PANEL THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA

PART ONE

PART ONE: wHY USE SOCIAL MEDIA TO ENGAGE YOUR PANEL?

A NEw PARADIGM OF ONLINE INTERACTION
In running Community Panels, we are typically concerned with ensuring that our members remain engaged with our panel. By engaged we mean that our panel, its activities and aims remain top of mind and membership overall is a source of positive enjoyment or interest for our members, so that when they receive a call to action from us to participate in a survey or other research activity, they are enthusiastic and motivated to do so. Aside from providing a thank you in terms of an incentive, we try to maintain this engagement through other meanscreating interesting and interactive content in portals or newsletters, sharing findings or running fun questions or quick polls. But for many panels, these communications are primarily unidirectional: either topdown from panel owner/researcher to member (invitations, survey instructions, newsletters), or bottom-up from member back to panel owner/researcher (survey responses, queries, etc.) The proliferation of social media has changed the paradigm of online content consumption: blogs, forums, Facebook, Twitter and other social media provide opportunities for individuals to create content rather than just consume it, and more importantly, facilitate the social aspect of online media: peer-to-peer interaction. As a result, people now expect to be able to initiate dialogue, not just respond, and to communicate freely with each other. Traditional media such as print newspapers, in their online form, have recognized this and typically provide feedback or discussion forums attached to columns. Even big brands acknowledge that consumers expect to be able to have a two-way conversation with them and that being open to this gives a brand credibility in the online space. As this shift takes place, panel owners may find that successfully engaging Community Panel members will require openness to member-to-member interaction, and permitting a freer format for conversation than is facilitated through a quantitative survey, or even a moderated discussion.

TAkING IT TO THE PEOPLE

Many of the people with whom panel managers want to engage are probably already spending significant amounts of their online time on social media sites. The stats speak for themselves: Facebook boasts 500 million active users worldwide and an estimated 135 million daily visitors. In the US, for example, approximately 65 per cent of the population have a Facebook account. Twitter is the 12th ranked website in the world with over 175 million registered users and about 95 million tweets every day. Social media is no longer even just the preserve of the young: the Pew Research Centre has found one in ten internet users ages 50 and older now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves or see updates about others.1 In trying to entice your members away from these sites and onto your panel portals as alternative destinations online, you are effectively trying to compete for members time and attention with these giants of the webiverse. Integrating a social media strategy as part of your panel engagement program enables you to push your content out to the places where your members are already spending time online, capturing attention share for your panel or brand in the places in which they are already active.

wHAT AbOUT THE SOCIAL MEDIA ANTISOCIAL?

Its important to remember that there are, of course, plenty of people who arent significantly engaged in social media, or not actively engaged. For example, active Tweeters represent just seven per cent of the US population, and of those, 65 per cent use it less than once a day, many never updating their status, but simply lurking. A recent Angus Reid Forum survey showed that two thirds of our panel members have Facebook accounts and 15 per cent are on Twitter. Despite that, our Angus Reid Forum Facebook page has 6,358 fansabout seven per cent of the entire panel. While we expect to increase this proportion as we continue to promote our social media activities, its still a key learning for us that our Facebook activities only reach a particular niche group within our total membership and so to weigh time investment against this.

1 www.pewinternet.org/reports/2010/Older-Adults-and-Social-Media.aspx

New York, London, Vancouver, San Francisco, Paris, Sydney, Toronto, Chicago

www.visioncritical.com
Vision Critical 2011. All rights reserved.

ENGAGING YOUR PANEL THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA

PART ONE

THE INFLUENCERS

That said, people active on social media are by definition, social. They are the online participators, the opinion leaders and the influencers: Tweeters are wealthier, better educated and index as early adopters2. So theres something to be said for extra efforts spent on them: theyre quite probably the people who participate most actively, and those who, if impressed, will advocate for your panel or your brand. As social media continues to grow in popularity and reach, building your presence there, in tandem with your panel, ensures that your panel and/or brand are tapping into this audience of active, online participators who have something to share, and reminding them of the opportunity to do some of that sharing via your surveys and other research activities. Also, while it has been noted that social media is not only for the young, its use and adoption is highest among those under 30the Gen Ys that have grown up with the internet. It is a growing challenge for researchers to engage with this particular demographic and to motivate them to participate in ongoing research activities. On the National Panels, response rates among the 18 to 34 year old group tend to be 10 to 20 percentage points lower than the next cohort up. Social medias popularity with this group may potentially represent a new means to engage them in the research process and once engaged, keep them interested in panel activities.

THE NATIONAL PANELS TRIAL

National Panels chose to focus our efforts in social media on two channels: Facebook and Twitter. While there are a plethora of social media networks out there, Facebook is the dominating force in social media in the three markets in which our National Panels currently operate. Its reach now extends into all parts of the population online, which is an important factor for our panels that seek to do the same. This is as compared to other social networking sites that tend to focus on, or skew toward, a particular target audience (e.g. LinkedIn for the business community, MySpace for artists/musicians, and Bebo for teens). Twitter represents a different mode of interaction to Facebook, which we were keen to explore. While its reach is narrower, it tends to attract those interested in new trends and who are motivated to share and influence. Although we could see the benefit of one feeding from the other, we decided not to attempt to launch both streams at once until we understood the time commitment involved. So we initially launched a Facebook page for the Angus Reid Forum, our Canadian panel, to test the waters and to try a few ideas to get people joining and talking, before launching Facebook pages for SpringboardAmerica and SpringboardUK. Some months later, we set up Twitter feeds for the three panels and started to promote these to members as we pushed out content. Our goal was to keep the amount of time involved in maintaining our social media presence to 15 minutes per day, once they were set up and established. So far we are pleased with the results of our experiment: we have almost 13,500 fans across our three Facebook pages, three quarters of whom are active. In the past 10 months, we have generated 52,000 total page views, and another 362,000 impressions due to our posted content appearing on fans Facebook feeds. The level of interaction with and between fans has also been high, with about 4,500 individual comments made and 1,400 likes of comments and posts. On Twitter, the numbers are smaller with about 1,300 followers of our Panels Twitter feeds. Generally there has been little two-way interaction with followers or between followers, although we have started to see an increase in the number of mentions, re-tweets, and clicks on our links. E.g. Over 30 days, we generated 800 clicks from 27 tweets (about 30 clicks per tweet). We have also been added to about 40 public lists (a Twitter feature that helps people to group those they follow into topics or themes, and to share those lists for others to use). Since the goal is fostering a greater sense of engagement with panel members, our next step will be to examine the levels of engagement and satisfaction among panel members that interact with us through social media, in comparison to those who do not. The findings from this will the subject of a future paper. In the meantime, the next three installments of our practical guide to engaging your panels through Social Media will get you started. Read on for part two: How to set up a Facebook Page and a Twitter Account for your Panel.

2 www.docstoc.com/docs/36424612/Twitter-Usage-in-America-2010

New York, London, Vancouver, San Francisco, Paris, Sydney, Toronto, Chicago

www.visioncritical.com
Vision Critical 2011. All rights reserved.