In this first post of its kind, I explain my methodology for using social media, and other non-social web services, to build a research framework for your social media marketing strategy. Look out for guides to later stages of the campaign process in forthcoming posts.

Thoughtful, relevant research should make your marketing and PR sing. It should be the causal foundation of your strategy, and the tactics you select to serve it. But it but it can also be a black hole for your budget before you’ve really started. This post describes an approach to research that costs nothing more than the man hours you commit. Essentially, the idea is to use existing, free online services to produce the intel you need to form your strategy.

For context, I’ve just completed the research stage of a campaign for a new client, using this free tools method alone. I put four days into it and got a solid set of results, although it would have been easy to take twice that to dig deeper and extrapolate further.

Part 1: Conversation Monitoring
Search tools can be used to trawl online conversations for mentions of your brand or any keywords relevant to you (eg. current issues, trends, competitors). There is an industry for potentially expensive social media monitoring solutions that use bespoke software and analysis to do this job. But we can replicate their monitoring in a more basic way by using existing, free, public tools such as:

- Twitter Search
- Boardtracker
- Technorati
- Google Insights for Search

There are loads – here’s a bunch more.

Being a manual process, you have to make guesses, try stuff out and gradually optimise your working using your own judgement. Using tools like those above, start with some keywords broadly relevant to your brand and see what results appear after running searches on them. If the results are too broad, define your searches with more specific keywords, narrower search tools, or advanced search filters such as specific regions or boolean operators. If the results are too scant or narrow, think laterally about what keywords are one step away from your brand but could easily be linked in conversation.

Part 2: Analysis
Typically, I would start to group the results in terms of the following attributes:

- Channels: On which platforms are most of the conversations taking place?
(Eg. forums, blogs, social networks, etc.)
- Groups: What types of people are having these conversations?
(Eg. group by age, gender, need, action, etc.)
- Influencers: Which people or sites are attracting large audiences?
(Eg. popular bloggers, YouTube channels, industry review sites, etc.)
- Topics: What subjects do the conversations rotate around?
(Eg. issues, brands, themes, events, etc.)
- Sentiment: What is the balance of negative, positive and neutral commentary around your search keywords?
(This is a big buzz-term for big-brand marketing but of little relevance to many.)
- Buzz: How much is being said?
(Note the numbers of search results where possible and measure again at frequent intervals.)

You should end up with tables that list the channels, influencers and so on, each against some kind of rating for how important it is (eg. numbers of views, friends, PageRank, members). This is now a map of your audience; the field on which your strategy will unfold.

You can apply this type of search and analysis not just to your community but also to your competitors and, as you go, look for best practice examples of those doing a good job of social media marketing already. It’s then down to you to turn those findings into a cohesive strategy that will produce value for you (advice on how to do that in a later post, I fear). The advantages of this type of research are primarily that, a) the web is a vast, heaving, unprecedentedly enormous data set, and b) most online conversation is inherently honest and open. Consider the equivalents offline and how much effort and cost it would require to get your audience in a room, speaking their minds.

Conversely, it’s limited in that you’re making qualitative assumptions on a big pool of potentially distracting or useless data and metrics. Guesswork? Yes. There may be science in marketing but marketing is not a science. The fact is, I find it’s extremely useful, not just in building a research-based marketing campaign but also in building my client’s audience intelligence and, gradually, bringing them closer, in-person, to the real people who influence their businesses.

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