Social Behavior: The BIG GAME — A Study with SurveyMonkey

In our previous posts, we partnered with SurveyMonkey Audience to examine trends in search and mobile behavior. For our final installment, we’ve asked internet users about how they use social media in their daily lives. The answers we gathered have given us some very insightful data. See what you can learn about the way your users interact with social media.

Let’s see how far the rabbit hole goes, shall we.

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What about search privacy?

Most people believe that more is better. This doesn’t apply to their private lives: 75% of people object to sharing their private search data. While more search data would make online marketing easier, people still want their privacy, and infringing upon that can be disastrous for user experience.

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Do “Likes” or +1s influence your search behavior?

They don’t! Only 12% of users are influenced by ‘Likes’ and +1s. It’s useful to know when implementing a social media marketing campaign that your site search traffic will not be heavily affected by not including ‘Like’ or +1 options (though we still do recommend them). People, for the most part just want their search results. Which brings me to my next point:

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50% of users don’t care about images in search results. Although half of users don’t care about the images in a search result this shouldn’t mean they are not helpful. Users’ eyes are more drawn to images on a page and while 50% of users don’t care (or don’t think they do), you shouldn’t neglect the half that does. Images are still incredibly important.

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What age demographic makes up each social network?

Facebook is not preferred by users under the age of 30, is not surprising. With so many different social media networks online (like Orkut, lol), along with the fact that younger users tend to go where their peers are. In contrast, users older than 30 go where you would expect them to go:

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Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter are most popular with users who are thirty and older.

With 30+ adults being bought up while these social networks were first being introduced, there is more of a brand association with them. So older (and we don’t mean old) users are drawn to more established social networks.

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Do users prefer sharing through Facebook or email?

75% of older user (45+) share using email. Unlike their savvier younger counterparts, older demographics (and again, we didn’t say old) are more comfortable using email as a form of communicating.

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70% of people don’t use the Facebook search engine While Facebook’s search engine may not be widely used (for good reason), there is a small segment of their audience that is taking advantage of their search function.

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How much time is spent on social networks?

From 2011-2012 time spent on social media has increased by roughly 30 billion minutes (or 37%). You may have thought Facebook increased the most, however there was a 4% dip in user visiting the site. However, Pinterest’s visits increased by 1000% (that is a whole lot of pins). This is a useful insight because it shows the social media market is not solely Facebook, a social media strategy needs to be holistic and flexible.

The point of conducting this study with SuveryMonkey Audience was to examine the behavior of online users and see if they align with the preexisting notions of search, mobile and social behavior. While many of our ideas were confirmed, we were also greatly surprised by many data points.

Please let us know your reactions. Were you surprised by any of the results?

 

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