Building a research plan to analyse social media behavior

Let’s say you’ve decided to deploy a social media analytics research project. Where do you start?

In this course, you’ll learn how to transform word-based questions into numbers. You’ll advance from hunches to testable propositions, then to concepts, and finally to variables. It all comes together as a relationship between two sets of numeric values, each measuring specific features of the things or phenomena you want to analyse (e.g., propensity to buy, buyer anxiety, sentiment response, risk-prone behavior, etc.)

The objective here is to focus how you think about social and digital media analytics around questions and insights. Whether through formal research for organisations or through spontaneous questions from management and other departments, you may be asked to use social and digital media data to answer questions and report actionable insights.

Conducting research using social media analytics will only help your organisation if you have a clear idea of why you are collecting data, how you plan to collect it, and what you plan to do with it. Therefore, the first week of this course will focus on what to do before you begin collecting your data. Specifically, you’ll read about developing a research plan and the five steps of the research process. You’ll also learn and discuss how to write research reports and present results effectively. After all, research is only valuable if people see the results.

Let’s get started!

• Have you created or were you on a team that developed a research plan? Tell us about it. What did you learn?