Is social media sample ‘fit for use’

Ashley Brown admits to having “concerns” over how representative the social media community is of the wider population. “Can we really rely on them?” a senior researcher recently asked the Kantar Media man, and are social media users “fit for use” in research?

Unsurprisingly, Brown’s research found that the social media landscape does not completely mirror a representative sample. 36% of users are between 15 and 24, the older generation are not engaging with the medium, the C1 category is over-represented by 10% and it seems the likes of Facebook are more popular with women than men.

But delving further into the data, Brown says there are similarities between social media users and non-users in their attitudes and choices: for instance, the media consumption habits of ABC1 males between the ages of 20 and 40.

So Brown thinks social media users do have a part to play in research, and Kantar is currently looking at weighing social media users into their national demographic sample. After all, the majority of social media users are exactly the types of respondents typically referred to as ‘hard to reach’. It would be foolish to ignore them.