When you start a new business you should make a research. Dating Business is worth a research due to the niche character of the sphere. When you establish a market-research study for your business, AllBusiness experts advise to follow these basic guidelines:

* Use the right sample. The research sample — your study’s group of participants — has to be just the right size. Too large a sample is not cost effective, and too small a sample offers inaccurate results. You also need to have the right samples from your overall population. Even a sample as small as one percent of a market or group will work, as long as the sample truly reflects the overall geographic area or population that you want to query. Comment: For Dating and Social Networking Industries the sample group may be a circle of people living near by, people of some club etc. And the bes thing to study is to let those people make the test run of a site, ask them usability questions.

* Mirror the market. Your surveys must reflect all of characteristics of the market from which it is drawn, such as geographical area or population group.

Nielsen TV ratings are based on very small samplings of the overall audience, but they’re accurate to a few percentage points. For example, if half of your target market is aged 65 and older and half is 30 and younger, make sure that the sample size accurately reflects this demographic. If one-third of your market lives in one town and two-thirds lives in another, your survey must reflect the geographic split in order to give you accurate and useful information. Comment: Location or ages are also important in our industry, though it’s more of relations issues. So you should study the things that might unite people at those locations, sources they would need at your site that would make them come back.

* Get quantifiable results. Successful studies follow proven approaches based on statistics and sampling. But don’t worry — you don’t need a PhD in mathematics. Most results can be tabulated with simple arithmetic and broken down into percentages that anyone can understand. Comment: You can also make a public report for your future users listing features that will be at your site (those that were most popular and appraised). You’ll attract more people then.

If you follow these guidelines, you’ll collect information that can contribute to the success of your enterprise. In short, market-research studies can save you money, save you time, and — above all — save you from disaster.

I personally think that research should always come first any start-up especially Social Networking or Dating as the industry is very tough and it requires high-quality marketing and promotion!