SOCIAL MEDIA FOR CONSUMER INSIGHTS

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The Role of Social Media in Research

Marketers rely on several variants of marketing research to make decisions. Options include: Secondary research – information already

collected and available for use. Primary research – information collected

solely for the research purpose at hand.

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Primary Social Media Research

The possible approaches to collecting primary data in social spaces include the use of consumer diaries, interviews and focus groups, surveys, and experiments.

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Qualitative Social Media Research

Observational Research involves recording behavior or the residual evidence of behavior.

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Qualitative Social Media Research

Ethnographic Research occurs when marketing researchers conduct field research by visiting people’s homes and offices to observe them as they go about everyday tasks.

Netnography is a rapidly growing research methodology that adapts ethnographic research techniques to study the communities that emerge through computer-mediated communications.

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Steps in Netnography

Identify online communities. Select those with high traffic, high levels of

activity. Learn about the group’s culture. Select material for analysis. Classify material. Keep a journal of reflections about the data

collection. Use member checks to assess accuracy of

interpretation.

Social Media Marketing, 2e©© Tracy L. Tuten and Michael R. Solomon 2015

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Quantitative Social Media Research

Monitoring and Tracking Social media monitoring occurs by carefully

choosing and searching the appropriate key words and the relevant social communities.

This process answers four basic questions:1. How many times was the search term found?2. When was the search term found?3. Where was the search term found?4. Who mentioned the search term?

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Quantitative Social Media Research

Sentiment Analysis refers to determining how people think or feel about an object.

The analysis consists of four steps:1. Crawl, Fetch and cleanse.2. Extract entities of interest.3. Extract sentiment.4. Aggregate raw data into a summary.

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Quantitative Social Media Research

The challenges of sentiment analysis Accuracy in gauging sentiment with automated tools Cultural factors, linguistic nuances and differing contexts Defining the sentiment dictionary Accuracy in the categorical data needed to make better

use of data

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Quantitative Social Media Research

Content Analysis Deep insight into the text (or other content) Pieces of information are classified and analyzed

for themes

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Content Analysis Codes

Context codes Respondent perspective codes Process codes Relationship codes Event codes Activity codes

Social Media Marketing, 2e©© Tracy L. Tuten and Michael R. Solomon 2015

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Caution! Research Errors and Biases

Coverage and Sampling Errors Coverage error is the result of a failure to cover all

components of a population being studied. Sampling error is the result of collecting data from only a subset,

rather than all, of the members of the sampling frame; it heightens the chance that the results are wrong.

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Caution! Research Errors and Biases

Nonresponse Bias Nonresponse error is the potential that those

units not included in the final sample are significantly different from those that were.

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Potential Problems

Volume of conversation Cultural factors in the meaning of language Multiple meanings – e.g., BP Accuracy in the categorical data

Social Media Marketing, 2e©© Tracy L. Tuten and Michael R. Solomon 2015

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