Crimson Hexagon's survey garnered opinions about daily social-media use, frequency, and content. It quizzed respondents about the time they dedicate to social media, their specific usage, the subject matter that motivates them, and their personal and professional influences. The survey posed questions that uncovered current, over-arching trends in social media use, as well as detailing which social media activities are changing the ways in which individuals express satisfaction or dissatisfaction business products, customer service, or actions.

The following key findings were revealed by the survey responses.

• Half those surveyed consider their social media content to be "lightly guarded." When given the option between "emotionally honest", "slightly guarded", and "completely factual", half the respondents (exactly 50%) agreed that their social-media content and tone remained somewhat defensive, while admitting that their shared content was sincere.
• More than a fifth of the respondents commit over four hours per day to social media. Over a third of those surveyed (39%), said they spent between two to three hours, and about the same number (40%) reported using social-media outlets less than one hour per day. A similar proportion (41%) classified themselves as -œaverage- when considering how advanced their social-media skills were.
• Email, Twitter, and in-person communications rank highest for business complaints. When complaining about a company's products or customer service, more than a third (37%) of the respondents choose to communicate by email, 18% prefer to complain in person, and 16% turn to Twitter ahead of other channels including phone, letter, or through third parties.
• A blend of personal and professional social-media use is typical. The large majority of survey respondents (80%) use social media both personally and professionally. Staying in touch with family and friends (33%) and creating business opportunities (32%) were given as the leading uses of social media, followed by sharing content (22%) and meeting new people (13%).

Curt Bloom, EVP, Global Sales and Marketing for Crimson Hexagon said, "Social media are an increasingly powerful outlet used by a broad range of people for a wide variety of reasons. Supported by our survey findings, we find that individuals are increasingly expressing genuine emotions while connecting with companies over social media on a more frequent basis. We are capturing this richer understanding of social-media users at Crimson Hexagon through our social-media analytics platform, ForSight. Only by understanding deeper social media metrics, including the thoughts and feelings of individuals, can companies begin to make smarter business decisions in advertising, marketing, customer communications, and more."

ForSight, Crimson Hexagon's patent-pending platform, is powered by a unique algorithm that combines human judgment with computer scalability to measure sentiment across billions of social media conversations. The platform currently holds 175 billion social-media posts in its database, while adding an additional one billion posts to its database every two days.