Measuring the Effects of Social Media and User Wellbeing

Challenge

Measuring social media engagement to help a popular social media company create a program that positively impacts user wellbeing.

Social media has gained a negative reputation for not caring for their users. To combat this negative perception, our client came to us to help create a tool that measures user wellbeing. Through this innovative, enduring, and globally-relevant tool, our client can now define and dimensionalize key functional behaviors to feed positive messaging on their platform.

Approach

To develop a reliable survey instrument, we started by conducting a literature review of relevant academic research. The survey underwent a rigorous vetting process by experts in the social sciences and government sectors to ensure its unbiased nature and broader applicability within the industry. Their valuable perspectives helped refine and inspire questions exploring the relationship between wellbeing and action, as well as generate hypotheses for testing throughout the research.

In a 15-minute quantitative survey, platform users were asked how online wellbeing activates creativity and inspires behaviors in their lives. The study was conducted across 5 key markets (US, UK, DE, FR, + BR) and tested across a competitive social media platform set. Our teams then met in-person to collaboratively discuss the framework for defining wellbeing among users and understand the elements our client needed to take action using the framework.

Impact

By beginning the groundwork, our client is now able to understand the wellbeing of their audience using the annual program we created collaboratively to make sure their users are being positively impacted by the content they come across on the platform. This annual program has been created as an open-source program to invite the entire industry to bring rigour and transparency to user wellbeing.