Sony uses Facebook Research to Inspire its Social Strategy

Liveminds recently worked with Sony and icuc.social to help shape their social content strategy. The challenge was to work out the type of content most worth investing in to deliver against Sony’s brand strategy and maximise engagement.

The research by Feeling Mutual involved recruiting participants, interested in certain media, in two European markets. Two methods were used to:

• Traditional qualitative field recruitment
• Behavioral Recruitment™, powered by Facebook to find participants with a particular media/brand consumption profile

Phase 1 - Engagement in Facebook

Social content exploration in Facebook - To understand the type of content the audience loved to consume and share. We also identified the best participants and engaged them in the remainder of the project.

Phase 2 - Online qual discussion

Testing participants reactions to content ideas - Liveminds Research Platform made this particularly successful as we got private responses and controlled which parts of the research were group or one-to-one.

The client was happy with the success of the project - Christina Lott, Senior Account Manager for Sony, at icuc.social:

"We are always looking for innovative partners and Liveminds and Feeling Mutual really delivered. Being able to get opinions directly from the exact target audience within the specific platform we wanted to talk to them on, was ideal."

Lead Researcher, Tom Woodnutt, Feeling Mutual said:

"Getting the participants more engaged and focused on discussing at a content level was a big benefit."

The insights gained in this project helped to guide Sony’s social strategy. It provided a clear direction for future creative decisions on the type of content to invest in and which strands to prioritize. The Behavioral Recruitment was so successful that the traditional recruitment complicated the project unnecessarily. The traditional methods were more expensive and used up a lot of man hours whilst providing no more useful participants.