Audience Research: Questionnaire

I felt a questionnaire was an effective way to reach my target audience as it is a quick and practical method to collect quantitative data. Participants don't have to spend too long answering the questions as they only have to tick a box. They don't have to think too hard about their answers as they are picking from a multiple choice and the questions are closed ended, therefore meaning those involved not having to expand on their answers. It is also easy for me to make observations and conclusions from the final results.

I used an application on Facebook called 'surveys for Facebook'. With over 900 friends on the social networking site, I thought this would be a much better way to reach my audience especially as the majority of my friends tend to young. It allowed me to add the questions and answers and invite the people I wanted too. This was great as I specifically wanted to ask certain questions and I decided to invite certain people who I knew were interested in the genre I felt I wanted to focus on (indie/alternative/folk rock).

Step One - Creating the Survey
Here, I created the survey, giving it an appropriate name (Your Ideal Music Video) and inserting a description so the audience have some instructions on what to do, etc.

Step Two - Adding the Questions and Answers

Here is the finished questionnaire after I added the questions and answers. I included age and sex in order to split up my audience and see if males or females tend to prefer one thing from the other. Other questions included what sort of videos do people prefer and whether they prefer to see the artist feature in the video. 

Inviting Friends to Answer the Questionnaire 

Finally, I selectively sent certain people requests to answer my survey. These were all people I knew had a similar preference in music that suited the idea of music video I wanted to make. Overall I selected 60 participants to take part in the survey. 

My Results

After sending requests out to 60 people to fill out my questionnaire on music videos I received roughly 30 replies which was great. After collecting and bringing the results together I found that overall people preferred narrative based music videos that include the artist. Generally people also felt 3-4 minutes was the appropriate length for a song but didn't really like videos that featured the artist singing or lip syncing the lyrics. Finally, the average age of my respondent audience was 16-20. However, this was expected as the majority of people I have on Facebook have a similar age as me.