Analysis of a survey about neighborhood social networks

Times are changing and the world is becoming more localized — where what is happening in one’s immediate vicinity is becoming more important. There are many reasons for this such as the trend and excitement of globalization is now mature, environmental benefits of connecting locally rather than further away are more important today and possibly a more settled group of people who now see themselves in a particular place for a longer term.

In the last week of March 2021, we at Simply Local conducted a survey to understand what in a neighborhood social network would be useful to residents. There were 96 respondents at the time of this analysis and this is a healthy number to understand users behavior. The survey had 14 questions, was voluntary and respondents could choose to remain anonymous. The economic background of the respondents would be mostly upper middle class who live in a few neighborhoods of South Delhi, India. Almost all of the respondents are not known to us.

There were three main goals of the survey:-

1. If one were to use a neighborhood social network what would it be for?
2. Understand the involvement and relationship of technology.
3. Do people even want to connect with their neighbors?

Here is an analysis of three of the questions.

1.

There were 4 buckets created with a list of twelve options of uses of a neighborhood social network. Some options repeated in various buckets. This was to understand the importance of an option in comparison to others. Respondents could only choose one option in each bucket clearly showing which is the most important to them over all others.

Above is a graph of one of the bucket questions. One can clearly see that Civic Issues is the hot topic for the neighborhood with 47 percent of the people identifying that as their main reason but interestingly close to 10 percent of the people want to make new friends in the neighborhood.

In the remaining buckets some of the other options were dating, social causes, and exchange items.

2.

When it came to using technology to connect with neighbors here is the graph.

This question was asking if users are willing to switch away from the big tech companies. Clearly the graph weighs towards yes people are happy to switch if there are alternatives. Unfortunately for smaller tech companies close to 40% of the respondents will remain loyal to the big guys. They probably don’t mind their personal data being used against them. Or maybe the small tech companies need to work harder to gain a user’s trust.

3.

This question was direct in asking — Do you even want to connect with more neighbors than you do currently. Again 90% lean towards yes they would like to — basically reaffirming that humans are by nature social beings.

Overall the survey showed very interesting insights into the benefits and uses of a neighborhood social network. We will be conducting more surveys in the future and sharing our analysis. In the meantime if you want to connect with your neighbors try out the Simply Local app.