#Blogchat Survey Results

Thanks to all 315 of you that took my #Blogchat survey over the last 10 days.  I really do appreciate it, and I apologize for constantly tweeting about it 😉  If nothing else, this proved to me that people on Twitter are scanning everything and quickly moving on. Every time I would tweet a link to the survey asking everyone to take it, I would get a few responses for about 5 mins immediately after, then nothing.  If I didn’t tweet a link out to the survey for 3 hours, the odds are I got zero new responses in those 3 hours.  Just very interesting to me, and it suggests that Twitter might not be the best avenue to get responses to a survey.

As I said in #Blogchat a few weeks ago, I really think surveys are under-utilized by bloggers, as they really can give you insights about your blog’s readership.  Granted, this is a Twitter chat we are talking about, but I wanted to share with you some of the things I learned from this survey, and why the results were so important.

I used Survey Monkey.  They offer a free version that lets you survey I believe up to 100 people, or you can pay $24 for one month, and have unlimited surveys, at up to 1,000 responses each before you have to pay more. Or you can get on an annual plan.

1 – Over 140 of the responses included a mention of some topics they would like to see covered.  This is big because it gives me an idea of what topics y’all want, so I can cover those, and make #Blogchat more interesting and relevant.  For bloggers, this could tell you what topics your readers want you to post about.

2 – I learned how many #Blogchat participants have their own blog, as well as how many of them blog for a company.  This is big, as it tells me how I need to breakdown the ratio of topics devoted to personal vs business blogging.  Also, on the company side, I found out more about the type of business y’all blog for (B2C, B2B, etc).  This helps as well.  Finally, I found out how many of y’all work for a small business, vs mid-sized or large company.  This also helps me tweak the topics we cover.

3 – I learned more about how ‘big’ the #Blogchat community is.  Up till now, I really had no idea how many ‘lurkers’ we had each week.  I know that we generally have 400-500 participants each week, but I was clueless about the number of people that are watching #Blogchat but aren’t participating.  Now I have a much better idea of what that number is, and thusless, how big the overall #Blogchat community is.

4 – I learned more about the gender and ages of the #Blogchat community.  This, along with the information gained on the size of the #Blogchat in #3, is very valuable to potential sponsors.

So those are just a few of the reasons why I did this survey, but really I wanted to learn more about the people that come to #blogchat every week.  When we were talking about our readership makeup a few weeks ago during #blogchat, a few of you asked ‘but how do you know WHO is reading your blog?’  This is one way: You ask them.  Surveys can really benefit your blogging efforts.

Now, onto the results!   And again, these results are from 315 respondents.

64.4% of #Blogchat members are female, 35.6% are male.  This figure is actually consistent with what I see from Likes on #Blogchat’s Facebook page.

As you can see from the above graph, the 40-49 age group was most common with 34.9%, 30-39 had 32.1%.

52.1% of respondents do blog for their employer.  I was actually surprised that this number was that high, I figured it would be around 25-33%.  Of the respondents that did blog for their employer, 86% do so for an employer with 500 employees or less.  In other words, if you follow #Blogchat and blog for your employer, you likely work for a small business.

As for types of blogging businesses represented in #Blogchat, 61.3% are B2B, 29.4% are B2C.

54.3% of y’all said you prefer to watch and learn versus participate in #blogchat.  This was probably the most interesting result of the entire survey for me, because it gives me my first real sense of the total size of the #blogchat community.  If that percentage holds every week, that means that #blogchat usually averages around 1,000-1,200 active followers/participants per week.

With this question, I was trying to figure out if most of #blogchat were ‘newbie’ bloggers, or more experienced.  65.6% of y’all said you’ve been blogging for at least 2 years.  And 31.6% have been blogging for 4 years or longer.  I was really surprised by that last number, and both suggest that #blogchat is full of experienced and knowledgeable bloggers.  Which is another reason why the chat is so valuable 😉 BTW, 92.1% of y’all said you do have your own blog, even if you also blog for your employer.

Finally, 27% of the #Blogchat community has bought a product or service based on the recommendation of someone in #Blogchat.  That’s a very high percentage, and it again speaks to the sense of community and trust present in #Blogchat!

So again, thank y’all SO much for taking this survey.  I tried to make it as quick and painless as possible, and many of you said it was.