Social media is one of the dominant forms of interactions on the Internet. Leading platforms such as Facebook and Twitter count hundreds of millions of users each month. In this article, I will show you how social media is a rich vein of data for user researchers. I will argue that it would be an oversight for an organization to treat social media as nothing more than an opportunity for customer service enquiries, help requests and brand advocacy.

In the commercial sector, social media is a source of data about users that often gets ignored in favor of other more controlled user research activities, such as interviews and user testing. (Though, it is often used to recruit participants for these traditional methods.) Conversely, in the academic world, social media was immediately recognized as an interesting primary source of data. But it has been typically addressed with quantitative research methods, such as visualizing information flows between network members and graphing peaks of activity, which are not so relevant in most typical user research projects.

In recent years, a range of commercially available monitoring software tools have emerged to make it relatively easy to track a range of keywords and capture a wealth of tweets, posts and mentions on topics of interest. However, these tools are also principally set up to do sentiment analysis, such as whether brand mentions are broadly positive or negative. But these high-level insights come at the expense of the nuanced details that reside in the individual tweets, posts and mentions. So, how can we do useful user research with social media?

Research Gold

Social media platforms enable social listening. We can tap into the recent or “in the moment” experience of real issues in context, rather than asking people, for example, to recall experiences in a face-to-face interview that takes place a week afterwards. It is particularly well suited to researching instances of mundane, everyday activities (such as smartphone habits) that would otherwise be poorly remembered and inaccessible to the researcher in the lab or to popular services that have already been launched. And when we tap in, we get data in the users’ language, not the language of the researcher. This amounts to research gold, and all we need is to get a pan and jump into the river. (There are some things to be aware of, of course, which I will describe later.)

A CASE STUDY FROM HIGHWAYS ENGLAND

While working as a user researcher for Highways England, I created the user research with social media technique that I describe here. This was part of a wide-ranging user research project to make wholesale improvements to the Dart Charge service. This is a highly used GOV.UK‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ service that enables over 5 milion drivers to pay remotely to use a part of the UK’s M25 motorway network in outer London, called the Dartford Crossing, where the motorway crosses the River Thames. A key research challenge was to understand user needs around paying before or after using the Dartford Crossing. Many other typical user research methods were used on this project, including user testing sessions and interview studies, but the service team welcomed new ideas for gaining research insights, particularly those relating to routine activities such as driving, because it was felt these were not well captured by the other types of research being done.

The sources chosen were Facebook and Twitter on account of their popularity in the UK among the 5 million users of the Dart Charge service. Salesforce’s Radian 6 (now part of Social Studio) was chosen because it supports tracking of multiple keywords across multiple social networks. We selected the month of August 2015, mainly because it was the most recent full month and gathered around a thousand mentions. It was also felt to be the maximum amount of data the team could analyze in the time available.

Ultimately, this resulted in 39 insights, which were added to the product backlog at the time of the research. The four steps in this technique were:

• define keywords to monitor,
• choose a tool,
• gather data,
• analyze for insight.