I’ve been wondering a lot lately about the readership of my company’s social commerce blog. Who are they? Where did they come from? Which type of content are they looking for? Recent findings, like one that found that “80% of blog traffic comes from first-time visitors“, have only made me more curious.
Ways of asking for feed back online tend to be annoying, ineffective and ugly as sin. So imagine my surprise when I came across a toned-down and unobtrusive pop-up survey on my friend’s excellent real estate industry blog. It took me all of 10 seconds to fill out, and I pinged him immediately after to learn whether the surveys had been effective–they had.
So I signed up for the white label version of KISSinsights ($19/mo., required for more than 30 survey responses per month) and gave it a shot. Installation on our WordPress blog was a 10-minute breeze, and setting up the first survey was equally painless.
You’re able to choose between a single-answer survey with radial buttons, a multi-answer survey with check boxes and a text-based answer field. Any answer respondents choose can expand to request additional information, which we’ve been using for the “Other” option. Once answered, the survey will not pop up again for returning visitors, and once minimized, it will remain minimized.
photo credit: flickr user bisgovuk
Here’s where it gets really cool. Each unique URL on your site can feature a different survey, so it’s easy to get super-specific feedback on each post (just like I did here). On a post about defining content curation, for example, you might ask readers to provide their own definition. Say you’d like to conduct a larger study of your blog’s readership. KISSinsights also lets you assign surveys by subfolder, so that any page within a specific subfolder features a survey, without you having to manually assign one survey to each page within your blog.
Bloggers are given remarkably flexible control over when, if and how a survey displays. Under “Who should be prompted to take this survey?”, we’re allowed these options:
- Anyone
- Only returning visitors
- Anyone who has already visited at least X pages on your website
- Signed in users
- Users that have been viewing the page for X seconds
- Continue showing even if the person has already answered this survey
Once a survey has been answered, the respondent can even be prompted to follow you on Twitter, or to Like your post on Facebook.
Aesthetically, KISSinsights is superior to almost any other survey option I’ve encountered. In it’s current iteration, you’re only given a choice between dark and light color schemes, but both are attractive and neutral enough to look good on almost any blog.
Response rates on the Bazaarvoice blog have hovered between 2-5%, but our traffic is strong enough that we’re still able to gather some meaningful data. KISSinsights has a decent user interface, within which you can see a breakdown of responses by percentage and number, an IP log, which browsers were used, the referring URLs, as well as which page was being viewed when the survey was filled out.
After exporting an analyzing results from our first two-week survey run, we’re ready to begin optimizing accordingly. Instant feedback makes for instant optimization. I can’t wait to learn more about our readers.
What are we really seeing?
I’m not going to explain the scientific method to someone that describes himself as “The Social Media Scientist.” In fact, I have enormous respect for Dan Zarrella and Hubspot, and I know he understands it. So why he writes an article like Twitter Accounts with a Profile Picture Have 10 Times More Followers Than Those Without beats the hell out of me.
Bottom line is, you can’t notice a correlation between two things and then assert one is the cause of the other without eliminating other possibilities.
Here is where he asserts causation: Effect of Profile Picture on Followers [emphasis mine].
Oh, and here, too: “…if you want to get followers on Twitter, it’s a good idea to upload a picture of yourself.”
And here are 5 likely alternative explanations for the correlation Dan noticed.
- Number of tweets. Maybe those without pictures tend to tweet less, and it is the latter variable that is causing their lack of followers.
- Spammy content. Maybe those without pictures tend to tweet spam more often, and it is the latter variable that is causing their lack of followers.
- Age: Maybe those without pictures tend to be newer accounts, and it is the latter variable that is causing their lack of followers.
- Location: Maybe those without pictures tend to live in locations where Twitter use is less common, and it is the latter variable that is causing their lack of followers.
- Lack of effort: Maybe those without pictures tend to put less effort into acquiring followers, and it is this latter variable that is causing their lack of followers.
I could go on and on. But that’s where you come in! Extra points for funny hypotheses left in comments.
As I’ve said before, Dan noticed something interesting here just by sharing the correlation he found. That alone was worthy of a blog post and perhaps a larger conversation. I don’t understand why he had to then jump to a conclusion and taint the larger effort. I really don’t. Based on our conversation (click “show conversation” after jump), he doesn’t seem to think there’s a problem with what he did. Cognitive dissonance? Who knows?
Remember, I’m writing this because I’m a fan, and posts like this might help influencers like Dan get better—and by extension, our study of the social media universe can improve. But I won’t say posts like this will do much of anything. That, after all, would be assuming causation 
.
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