Reader Survey 2022 – Focusing our efforts for a bigger and better ThinkGeoEnergy

ThinkGeoEnergy 2023 Reader Survey Results

Carlo Cariaga 16 Jan 2023

Before the end of 2022, we ran a reader survey to receive input from our readers and gauge interest on some of our planned additions to the ThinkGeoEnergy website and suite of services. The survey ran for about two weeks and was promoted on all our social media channels and our weekly newsletter. We now present the results of this survey.

First of all, we are extremely grateful for all those who took the time to respond to our survey. Your response is invaluable in helping us focus our work and resources the parts of our website that are most important to our audience. As promised during the rollout of the survey, respondents who provided their email addresses will soon be receiving a white paper on the current status of installed global geothermal power generation capacity – a more detailed version of our recently published Top 10 list.

Direct visits to the site visits via our weekly newsletter remain the major sources of traffic for the website. Traffic coming from LinkedIn and other social media channels has become significant and is an encouraging result of our efforts to increase our social media engagement.

The survey results show that the site has some rather frequent visitors, with one in four visitors coming everyday and about 9 out of 10 coming to the site at least once per week.

In terms of positioning in the industry, the survey results show a rather diverse distribution with practically all segments of the geothermal industry well-represented. A significant majority come from project development and business development, which is not a surprising result.

The survey participants are nearly all aware of our weekly newsletter and are mostly aware of our bi-weekly webinar series. While our language platforms in Spanish and Turkish are known, we will need to work on the promotion and positioning of our research services for greater awareness. We are planning on a wider launch of our research products and services in the coming months.

Rather unsurprisingly, most of the survey respondents ranked project updates on geothermal power and heat projects as the most valuable content on the website. News on technology and scientific developments remains a key topic that a significant portion of the respondents deem important.

We were also curious about the perspective of our readers regarding geothermal events and how they have been affected by COVID and its associated restrictions. While majority of the responses recognized the networking value of major geothermal events, there is also a significant portion who choose to focus on learning via webinars and other virtual events. We hope to contribute to this further with our bi-weekly webinar series.

With this survey, we wanted to gauge our audience’s interest in engaging with our content, particularly on social media. While there remains a solid interest in webinars and podcasts, interest in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok is decidedly minimal compared to the engagement that we are getting in LinkedIn. We shall continue to be active and monitor our social media platforms, but engaging on LinkedIn is most important.

In terms of our planned and new content, our survey participants responded strongly to our regular webinar series and the detailed “About Geothermal” section. We are currently working on revamping the latter in line with our mission to make geothermal a more accessible subject for the general audience. We are already working on some of these aspects of the website, so stay tuned.

Lastly, we gave the chance for the survey respondents to provide us feedback, criticism, or ideas on what they would like to see in the website. The results were a mixed bag of insightful and mostly encouraging remarks. Here below are some of our favorite feedback:

• “A really informative page providing valuable insights into the global geothermal sector!”
• “A very important part of my daily global Geothermal updates, excellent and verified content.”
• “The #1 source of geothermal news, as it provides a consolidated overview of everything that’s going on in the industry.”
• Useful information service and world production statistics that (others) don’t provide.
• ThinkGeoEnergy is a fantastic platform which needs to be supported more by the industry players’ for the benefit of the industry itself. Would suggest readers to contribute more on feeding news on the platform. Would suggest the platform to implement a system to become more interactive.
• TGE is in a class of it’s own when it comes to anything and everything geothermal. Everything produced and shared is of high quality and greatly appreciated.

Also equally valuable were the suggestions how we can make the website better:

• “Publish more news about shallow geothermal systems and heat pumps. this will contribute to the development and expansion of the geothermal industry and you.”
• “TGE could include more information about policy differences between countries regarding geothermal development and protection of geothermal features.”
• “Would suggest readers to contribute more on feeding news on the platform. Would suggest the platform to implement a system to become more interactive.“
• “Sometimes news bites taken from “loud” groups can give unbalanced attention to them over more traditional and established companies or groups who aren’t so into self promotion. Somehow through quality opinion pieces or interviews with people the quieter and more valuable interests could rise to the top rather than verbatim press releases.”

Again, our utmost appreciation to everyone who responded to our survey and to our readers who have continued to support us through the years. We shall consider all the input from the survey in our plans moving forward. Readers can also continue to engage with us for feedback, suggestions, and news stories via our social media channels or news@thinkgeonergy.com.

We have big plans for ThinkGeoEnergy for 2023 as we work to diversify our services and reach out to a wider audience. In the coming months, we will be launching the results of these efforts.