How did we find your preferences about K-pop?
The graph shows the cumulative sum of the K-pop survey participants each day, beginning from Feb. 7-17. Graph by Lee Jong-eun
By Dong Sun-hwa
By Dong Sun-hwa, Lee Gyu-lee
“Why do you dislike/hate K-pop?”
The Korea Times conducted an
on Feb. 7-17, asking 1,676 people their biggest reason for disliking/hating K-pop. We posed three multiple choice questions about the reason, the participants' age and ethnicity, followed by one short request for further comments.
The goal was to find why people do not like K-pop despite its global rise. The survey aimed to tackle the most “urgent” problem first, hence only allowed respondents to choose one main reason.
The Korea Times also posted the survey on several platforms used by people of different ages and nationalities including our Facebook, Twitter, website and online communities.
Platforms
Feb. 7 post on Facebook. Capture from Facebook
We initially shared the survey link with a K-pop-related photo through Facebook on Feb. 7 and ran an advertisement on the post until the Feb. 13. With this post, people had to click the link in the caption ― not the photo ― to access the survey. A total of 0.09 percent of the users our post had reached through the ad, clicked the link and 0.34 percent of them clicked the photo.
Feb. 14 post on Facebook. Capture from Facebook
To boost users' participation, we also posted our survey on The Korea Times website from Feb. 14. Then we shared the link on Facebook with the same image and ran the second round of ads. This post allowed people to approach the survey by simply clicking the post's image ― directing them to our website.
After running the second ad until Feb. 17, around 1.25 percent of users it reached had clicked the image.
We also posted our survey on Twitter and other online communities such as Reddit, but did not analyze the results separately because the number of participants was minimal.
Improvements
More than 103,000 people visited the music and culture festival staged by Korean entertainment company CJ ENM in the southern Californian city last year. Courtesy of CJ ENM
The options for the Reasons category were selected based on comments frequently made among music critics and K-pop communities. However, the overall tone of the questions may have been misleading due to our use of extreme words, such as “hate.”
The better version of the question would have been: “What is the biggest issue of K-pop?”
Participants' gender also should have been included in the survey to boost the specification of the sample population.
In regards to the first post on Facebook, the number of clicks on the photo was 3.8 times higher than that on the link, showing people's tendency to respond to visuals rather than the words. This leads to the next improvement in choosing the method of advertising on Facebook. If we hyperlinked the photo from the beginning of the survey period, we would have attracted more people.
The survey was posted on The Korea Times website a week after the survey opened. However, the number of people accessing a survey from the website was highest among other platforms ― 82.2 percent.
If the survey had been exposed on our website earlier, it seems the survey could have attracted more respondents.
In terms of the platforms, we experienced flaws in collecting the response rate of each platform. The number of participants accessing the survey ― from Feb. 14-17 ― was from both the website and Facebook, which made it impossible to distinguish the number per platform.
We should have duplicated the survey into separate links. This not only would have helped us identify the response rate but also to identify a user's tendency and preference of each platform. Figuring out the tendency can be used as a reference for future activities.