It it amazing to see what are the main things that people think about when they are posting information on these various social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others. That is what researchers and practitioners want to find out – what are the motivations and reasons behind these actions? Is this part of creating an online persona and reputation online? Well, there was a recent study that was conducted by MarketingProfs that looked into the “minds” of Twitter users, and they had participants fill out a survey. There were some interesting results that were reported about Twitter users.
There were a few things that I think that this research study might have wanted to address in regards to approaching this research study. First, it all comes down to the research question – I believe that really determines how you are going to approach your study and decide what method to choose. Based on what I saw in this study, the researchers wanted to know what was the motivations and get inside the minds of Twitter users.
So basically, is a quantitative research method such as a survey the best way to truly find out what is going on in the minds of this selected group of individuals? I would be interested to know the process in how these scales were developed, and how they came about looking at these particular items. There may be other reasons and motivations on why Twitter users use this social media platform, and this can be looked at by conducting projective focus groups, in-depth interviews, and having them keep a diary of their daily activities in using Twitter. This is a great opportunity for future research.
Secondly, I believe that this article might have wanted to have statement or two about the implications of these findings – what is the significance to these findings to the marketing and public relations profession in regards to social media? How will this specifically benefit marketers, consumer behavior researchers, and public relations professionals? I think that the research findings are great – we just need to have a brief discussion on the “why” factor.
I also believe that this is an interesting line of research, and I thought that it was great that this was a Marketing study. Marketing is my cognate area in my Ph.D. program and Public Relations is my primary area – so studying social media fits in perfectly! 🙂
Hope you all are having a great day!
Best Wishes,
Karen
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