Those of us who do social media research know that the kinds of opinions you see in Facebook are often very different from what you see in Twitter, YouTube, or any other website. People gravitate towards the websites that best suit their personality which means every website has its own Olympic vibe.
In the traditional world of market research, you can look at this as a sampling exercise. If you don’t consider the opinions from one group of people, your research results will incorporate a massive confound.
This chart demonstrates just how severe that confound can be. Facebook, the first website in the chart, contains the largest collection of positive verbatims. Specifically, 49% of Facebook verbatims are positive vs just 14% negative. However, among the full list of websites shown here, between 16% and 49% of the verbatims are positive, a huge range of 33 points. And, between 3% and 27% of the verbatims are negative, a range of 24 points.
Perhaps another way to look at this is if you want to read something nice and be happy, go analyze Facebook. But, if you want to be a Negative Nelly, then head on over to Topix.com.
