To really find out who your audience is, the best thing to do is ask them! Surveys are a good way to do this, as well as a good way to get feedback directly from your readers about your blog.
But do they work? Yes and no. While the info you get is usefull, there are some caveats to be aware of.
Survey Caveats
- Incomplete surveys. Many people get half way through and don't make it to the end.
- Few responses. People don't tend to take surveys, which means you end up with a small sample set.
- Skewed results. Those who take surveys tend to be the ones who are already vested in your blog. It's not a random sample of all visitors.
Making Your Survey Successful
To make your survey more successful, try the following:
- Keep it short. Nobody wants to fill out 10 pages of questions. If you can keep it 10 questsions on one page, you'll get more responses.
- Use multiple choice. Multiple choice questions are faster to respond to than write in answers. You'll have less incompletions if people feel they are moving through the survey quickly.
- Have an "anything else you'd like to add" box at the end. Make it optional. You'd be surprised how many people do take the time to fill this one in.
- Consider an incentive. Prizes randomly drawn from all survey participants can help motivate people to take the survey.
Walker Blogs Survey
We recently ran a survey on the Walker Blogs to find out more about our readers. The survey ran for 2 weeks and had 61 responses. Statistically, this won't tell us a ton as far as percetage of overall userbase is concerend, but it did give us insight into who was reading our site:
- Over 40% found the blogs through a link on a non-Walker blog or web page
- The most read blogs are Off-Center and New Media, a finding also supported by Walker usage stats
- Over 80% appear to be regular readers, choosing weekly, daily or reading whenever their RSS reader let them know that there was a new post
- The top reasons for reading the blogs included general art news, inside Walker information, and technical commentary; people indicated that they like artist/guest blogging and they want more artists interviews and behind-the-scenes coverage
- Over 40% had been to the Walker within the last 6 months while 36% had never been here (size of sample: 25 and 22 people respectively)
- More survey respondents lived outside MN and outside of the US than lived in the Twin Cities metro
Walker Blogs Internal Survey
A good idea is to also survey your internal staff about you blogs. It's a great opportunity to not only understand how your staff views the blogs but also what you can do to improve them with regards to your day to day life at work.
We did an internal survey at the Walker around the same time as our public reader survey. This survey was simply an email circulated around with write in questions. Among the various themes from respondants:
- Everyone is aware of our blogs
- Only half of our staff reads our blogs. Of those who do not read, many cite not having time as the reason.
- Many staff have gotten positive feedback about the blogs or have heard mostly positive things about them.
- Many staff say they would like to see more bloggers internally blogging instead of the few that do now.
- A majority of the staff the responded would love to blog, but simply do not have the time, or do not feel they could get permissions to spend the time from their supervisors.
- There seems to be a question as to how "professional" the Walker blogs are among a few respondents. Whether the blogs represent a personal voice or an institutional one, is a question that comes up.