Surveys and Social Media

You don’t need me to tell you that social media is everywhere. 69.2% of Millennials are expected to use social media in 2025. Already, Gen Z and Millennial females claim to use social media almost 3 hours a day. Facebook alone has over 3 billion users worldwide. Social media is truly everywhere.

Like every other industry, market researchers have turned to social media. Sometimes, researchers and companies will use social media just like anyone else. They will promote their work and their business, update their followers on upcoming events and conferences they will attend, and celebrate achievements and employee milestones. However, there are many more ways social media can be useful to market researchers.

Social Media Surveys

The most obvious use of social media for market research is surveys. Instagram stories, TikTok videos, and X all have on-site surveys that can be run with ease. YouTube will sometimes forgo ads before videos with a quick survey on any number of topics. And of course, anyone can ask for opinions and thoughts in the comments section of their post. 

Whether running them as ads on the site or on polls within the site itself, surveys through social media have proven effective. Respondents are more likely to answer a survey that they have encountered within social media than a survey on any other medium. Social media ads in particular are incredibly successful at finding panelists for survey panels. A study conducted in 2014 tried to recruit respondents for a survey in two different ways: one, through basic social recruitment and emails through Facebook, and another through ads run through Facebook. Not only did the ads ultimately cost less to run, they ended up getting almost 3x the number of respondents the social recruitment and emails did. 

Social Listening

Another useful tool for marketers and researchers is social listening. Also known as social media scraping, it sometimes has a negative connotation as being invasive, stealing private data without consent. While this is sometimes true of web scraping, social media scraping only accesses data and information provided publicly through social media. This isn’t to say social listening isn’t regulated; Meta has strict rules regarding who can scrape information from Facebook and Instagram, and why.

Nevertheless, social listening is a powerful tool. Scrapers are able to automatically collect information on certain topics from social media platforms. Companies will sometimes use them to get a feel for consumers’ thoughts on their brand; hundreds of negative comments about a brand across Reddit will point them in the direction of where things might be going wrong. 

For market researchers, social listening tools can be used for sentiment analysis, or identifying and quantifying customer sentiment on a grand scale. Social media posts, comments, and reviews are a gold mine of information for sentiment analysis. A TikTok user that complains about the color of their new shoes puts that information out for a scraper to pick up. That scraper feeds the information into an AI Large Language Model (LLM), along with thousands of other similar data points, to provide a summary of general sentiments on the product; in this case, “the red version of these shoes is ugly”. Market researchers can then present this information to their clients, who in turn can make the changes they deem necessary for their products.

B2B Sales

Market researcher companies are just that: companies. However, while many businesses sell their products and services directly to consumers and customers, called B2C sales, market researchers instead sell their services to other businesses, called B2B sales. The process is simple: if a company wants to know how people feel about their product, they will hire a market research firm to conduct the survey, compile the data, and share the results back with them. That’s the basis of the market research model.

Like any other business, market researchers have to sell their services on the market. Thus, many turn to social media to promote themselves and their work. Through social media, market research firms can share their experiences, their findings, and their achievements with the wider world in the hopes that potential clients will see them and seek them out for work. It works: on LinkedIn, 84% of content marketers believe it is the most effective way to advertise their business. The social media site’s revenue from B2B sales was over $3 billion in 2024. 

The Future of Social Media

Social media isn’t going anywhere. While different sites gain and lose popularity from year to year, or even month to month, it’s been an important aspect of our lives for over two decades. It’s grown and changed, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse (depending on who you ask), and will continue to change and evolve as time goes on. One thing is for certain, though: market researchers love social media, and we’re never letting it go.