Most everyone agrees that timely and targeted consumer research is key to extracting valuable insights that can be critical across all aspects of a business, whether its product development and positioning, marketing and strategy, customer experience and satisfaction, or major company decisions about market expansion, M&A, or corporate transformation. Having a finger on the pulse of your key stakeholders is essential.

But existing market research methods have limitations, particularly in the pandemic age. Phone surveys, web portals, focus groups all have been used for decades to gauge consumer sentiment, and they still have a place in the researcher’s toolbox. But in today’s ubiquitously connected, ultra-mobile world, new ways to reach consumers need to be explored.

The rise of social media offers such an opportunity. Today, it is possible to survey a very vast population directly by recruiting respondents via channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. There are approximately 4.48 billion social media users worldwide (and the number just keeps climbing). That equates to about 57% of the current world’s population and that’s where most consumers are spending their time nowadays.

Those channels have become one of the most effective, time-efficient and inexpensive tools for recruiting target respondents and collecting data on their consumption habits. This is a natural evolution from the more passive social scraping and social listening tools that are used to gauge sentiment and drive analytics. It’s a proactive and targeted method we call social sampling and it borrows from the highly effective playbook of advertisers who have recognized the precision and effectiveness of targeting niche audiences on a global scale.
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