Finding survey respondents can be time-consuming and costly. Here are some of my favourite go-to methods for getting the answers I need. Some of these can even be adapted to help find in-person usability interview subjects as well.

With over 330 million users talking across 138,000 topics, Reddit can be a fantastic resource for surveying your demographic. There’s even a subreddit specifically for surveys.

Reddit’s own directory of their largest subreddits by topic
/r/SampleSize surveying subreddit

Be sure to check the community sidebar to make sure that posting surveys is allowed. If not, you can always adapt the most important questions into a discussion post instead.

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Facebook Groups

Similar to Reddit, there are countless Facebook Groups with over 1.4 million active users. These numbers may seem overwhelming but they’re actually really good news, because no matter how niche your demographic is, you’re going to be able to find a group that speaks directly to it. Launching a product for amateur mouse taxidermists, building an app for people who are addicted to instant ramen noodles, or trying to target first responders who like lip syncing? Facebook has you covered.

There are also some groups specifically for surveys:

Of course, just spamming a link to your survey isn’t going to be very effective, and some groups may even kick you out for it. Take the time to engage people in these communities before you post to see better response rates.

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Twitter Polls

Twitter Polls can be useful for asking a single question and getting quick responses. Keep your poll questions short and sweet. Your audience is more likely to respond when they can read it quickly in their feed. Polls work better the more subjective and authentic the question is. For example, you will probably have more success with questions like, “How many times have you had dessert this week?“ as opposed to “Do you like our product?”.

Twitter only allows four responses, so I find that adding “Other (comment below)” as my final response rate is helpful in getting a conversation going.

To increase your response rate, use hashtags wisely to help people find your polls. You can also write a list of questions, even escalating within a specific topic, and post a new poll at the same time each day.

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Google Surveys

Google Surveys offers two main products: Website Surveys and custom surveys, also called “Tagged Surveys”. They are easy to set up and fairly inexpensive to run.

Website Surveys give you a code snippet which will periodically pop up in the corner of your site to ask users about their general satisfaction, including a general rating and free text questions for more qualitative feedback.

You can also create custom surveys with multiple question types, as well as logic and screening questions. You can choose your own audience using tags, or choose from a list of pre-vetted audiences who have already signed up to take surveys. Single-question surveys which appear like ads on other web pages cost pennies, after which you pay a single flat fee per completed survey for up to 10 questions.

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Slack Groups

If your audience is tech or business related, joining a public Slack group is a useful tool to connect with them. You can find a list of goups to join on Slofile, the public Slack community database.

Just as with Facebook, don’t join just to spam a link to your survey. Take the time to engage with people and give back to these communities before you post to see better response rates and connections.

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Facebook Ads

If your audience fits within Facebook’s targeting categories, running ads that point to your survey can be a good way to generate traffic.

I find that running multiple versions of an ad with different headlines is useful in understanding how to speak to an audience. For example, some demographics may be inspired to take a survey because they want a chance to speak openly about their experiences, while others might be more inspired if they are being asked for their expert input. Some still may only be motivated by a cash incentive, which we will talk about more later. Think about the possible motivations someone might have to take your survey and write headlines based on those.

Facebook ads aren’t the cheapest to run at volume, but you can put a cap on your spend and use the data you have to adjust and maximise your effectiveness in later campaigns.

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SurveyTandem and SurveyCircle

These survey “rings” (as I call them) allow you to sign up for an account and take surveys in exchange for responses. You can also buy credits to purchase additional responses. They are more appropriate and useful for generic behaviour analysis, for example of an age group or location-based demographic, as opposed to targeting specific interests or behaviours.

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To Incentivise or Not To Incentivise?

Incentivised surveys have a higher completion rate of up to 30%. Finding the right incentive can be tricky though, especially when on a budget.

Be aware that incentivising may alter your data. For example, if you offer a $10 reward for a survey that takes 20 minutes to complete, you may be excluding people for whom that’s not a worthwhile use of their time. I recommend running multiple versions of your survey over time, so you can be aware of this effect.

Here are a few incentivisation ideas that might work for your audience and budget: