How much do we really know about social media users?
We assume that we know quite a bit about how different generations are using social media, but are we being blinded by how we each personally use the sites?
This is the question we posed to ourselves earlier this year, and in order to really learn more about how differences in generations when it comes to using social media sites, we set up a survey to get the data directly from the general public.
The results from the survey took us by surprise, so we wanted to see if we were the only ones. Based on the results from the survey, we set up a 3 question "Lab42uesday Quiz" that we sent out to our email newsletter list to see how well these industry professionals knew social media users.
The results from the Lab42uesday Quiz surprised us even more.
Based on the results from the survey, people were more likely to click on ads on Facebook than other sites. However, only about 60% of our newsletter recipients answered with Facebook, and nearly 36% thought Instagram had the highest likelihood for click throughs.
In the survey, we asked our respondents on which social media platform they follow brands or company profiles, and the majority of respondents answered that they followed these types of profiles on Twitter. Surprisingly, only about 21% of our newsletter recipients guessed Twitter, with nearly 60% thinking that people followed brands on Instagram at a higher rate than other social media sites.
For the final question of the quiz, we wanted to dig deeper, so we cross-tabbed the survey data by generations in order to identify differences among various age groups. We asked our newsletter recipients if they could identify which social media platform Gen Z (aged 13-22) used the most to engage with CPG brands and companies, and only 14% identified Pinterest as the correct answer. Nearly 43% incorrectly thought Snapchat, and another 21% thought Twitter.
Out of all the newsletter recipients who answered the Lab42uesday Quiz, only 6% answered all three questions correctly, with 94% answering at least one of the questions incorrectly. These numbers highly suggest that we may not understand the changing landscape of social media nearly as well as we assume we do, and conducting customer research is a very effective way to better understand your target audience.
