At UMSocial, content creation is informed by the audience we’re trying to reach as well as the platform we’re trying to reach them on. Although analytics from Twitter and Facebook can provide general data about the UMSocial audience—broad demographic and location trends, clicks, views, and engagements—we want to gather metrics that will help us understand our audience on a deeper level. Specifically, we are interested in:

  • Priority of platforms: do users prefer one platform over another?
  • Likelihood of seeing UMSocial content: where is our content making the most impact?
  • Frequency of usage: which platforms do users check in the most on?

This sort of data can best be collected through a direct survey—which is why we made one.

The short survey consists of 10 questions that will enable us to understand more about our audiences. It will be distributed widely across campus and beyond. Additionally, we’ll be taking a deeper dive and interviewing selected survey respondents about their experiences with U-M social media.

At UMSocial, we think of content as a two-way street: how users interact with our messages influences the type of messages we put out in the future. By better understanding the type of content that users see  (and are hoping to see) on each platform, we can adjust our strategy to communicate more effectively with our audience.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be promoting the survey on Twitter and Facebook. We hope to be able to report our results by early June, and will be sharing our findings with university social media leadership, and, of course, right here on socialmedia.umich.edu . Be sure to check back in to get the scoop!

Want to take the survey yourself? Go to myumi.ch/6jzBN.

This post was written by #UMSocial intern Peter Schultz. #StaySocial with him on Twitter @PeterkSchultz.