Social networking is a recent phenomenon and is growing fast, and facebook is the largest networking site of its kind. With more than 200 million active users, facebook is popular and worldwide.  It is remarkably "sticky" and gaining momentum in key markets, hence offers a good opportunity to utilise it for market research.

Our iOmnibus surveys uses facebook as a platform to:

• Access usually hard-to-reach younger demographics who are difficult to survey using traditional telephone and online tools
• Recruit "virgin respondents" who don't usually participate in market research
• Reduce market research costs and gain time: a third cheaper than traditional survey!

Lifescience Dynamics develops a "page" or a "group" with the relevant topic and a "push" application to encourage participation.  We recruit group members through general invitation campaigns, "snowballing" and/or advertisements. Then we present business issues in the form of 'questions of the day/week/month', posting them within an agreed timeline to gather and analyse respondents' opinions and answers.

iOmnibus is most suitable for quantitative studies, allowing us to deal with long and complex questionnaires in small chunks of four to five minutes each (i.e. 30 mins  cut into six chunks in a conjoint exercise). Some qualitative information can also be collected using "discussion topics" to stimulate debate among group members or by asking respondents to upload photos, video or links and give comments and opinions.

It can be used to

• Analyse any kind of stimulus materials: Detail aid testing, leave piece testing, DTC in the USA, or disease awareness campaigns in Europe, website, pack, concept, etc.
• Carry out ongoing monitoring: insights, needs analysis, brand attitudes, new ideas/concept evaluation, patients/specific condition monitoring, etc
• Conduct scenario studies