Surveys are hard, free surveys are even harder
No, I’m not going to make you read through my entire life story. The answer to my click-baity title is that I leveraged social media, more specifically, Instagram. More impressively, Instagram stories, hence the 24-hour time limit. I think it’s also important to mention that I’m not a social media expert.
I’m currently working on an application that involves winter transportation habits for people who frequent the mountains to engage in winter sports, specifically skiing. The app was brought on by a need to increase sustainability for major ski resorts and decrease consumption and carbon footprint. Full disclosure, I am a member of this community.
In the future, I’ll have a full case study on this project but for right now I want to focus on the success of collecting survey data. Over the course of my discovery and research, I carefully curated a Google survey that would capture all of the travel data I needed.
In Denver, we have one main highway corridor that transports Denverites to the weekend escape that the rocky mountains so bountifully provides. What started as an Instagram account to poke fun, commiserate, and post about the general nonsense that is seen and experienced on the I-70 corridor, turned into a phenomenon in just a few short years.
I’m not going to name the group here but if you’ve ever driven on I-70 anywhere in the country, you might know about this group. I took a chance and reached out to the moderator. Here are some simple steps to reaching out to groups successfully on social media.
1. Make sure the group has enough activity and followers.
The group I reached out to has 372,000 followers, makes multiple posts per day, is active in stories, and is primarily comprised of content that is sent in by users. The reply engagement on posts ranges from 100-1000 comments.
2. Ask the moderator for permission, not forgiveness
Reaching out to Social Media moderators about surveys can be tricky. Moderators (for some reason on Reddit, especially) often have a God complex. Understand that you are asking the moderator to effectively advertise something for you for free.
They also might be in collaboration with a competing company that pays them sponsorship or advertising money. The moderators are usually the first barrier to entry.
I asked for permission by DMing the account moderator with the following message:
“Hi, I’m a User Experience Designer and I’m working on developing a gamification app to make the ski commute more sustainable. I’m creating a survey to understand people’s commuting habits in the winter on i-70. Would you be open to posting a Google survey in the group’s stories?”
3. Make an appeal to the moderator
5 days later, I received a generic reply asking me to send an email to them. YES, I was in! But, in order for them to comply, I had to establish legitimacy since most of what’s on the internet is scammy. My email was a bit more specific. The general outline was:
- Remind them about my original DM outreach and my title.
- Cite data I collected in the research phase.
- Communicate the problem statement.
- Explain what I planned to do with the data within the context of building an application.
- Reassure them that no personal data would be collected and survey responses would be anonymous (perhaps the most important step).
- Spell/grammar check my email and include a signature with my contact information to increase my legitimacy.
The Response I received from the moderator was a dream:
“This is neat! I took the survey. I like what you are trying to achieve and can definitely relate. I’m happy to throw this up on a story with a link this week. Does that work for you?”
It worked for me!
A Few Reminders About Your Survey
1. Make your survey anonymous
No one wants their data collected only to suddenly have it sold to the highest bidder and have an inbox full of phishing scams. There are platforms you can use if you are trying to test a certain demographic if that’s what you seek. In this case, I needed quantity to test the hypothesis I had and Google Surveys does an amazing job synthesizing the data into whatever chart you want.
This may age me but, Suck it Excel!
2. Take the time to curate your survey and test it with a small amount of respondents.
Before my survey was posted to Instagram, I had 12 family members and friends take the survey. I wanted to make sure there was no confusion and that there were no dead ends given that my survey included multi-path responses.
3. Adjust
After testing I noticed there were some additional points I wanted to test and I added those questions in. I knew once it was posted on social media that I would only have one shot to collect the data I really needed so I carefully thought about how to adjust the questions to capture the additional data I was missing.
Let it Rip
For me, testing and synthesizing data into insights is one of the most thrilling parts of UX/UI. Not all surveys to social media may garner this many responses but I truly believe that the steps I followed led me to successful results.
Have fun and let me know what has worked for you.