Social media monitoring vs Social media research: Can you see the difference?

July 26, 2010 | 3 Comments

Photo puravida from morguefile

Many people are curious about the difference between social media monitoring and social media research. The distinction is clear, and fairly easy to see if you have experience with market research.
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Social media monitoring

• The act of reviewing and tracking social media data
• May include tracking the volume of data meeting specific criteria, possibly tracking the sentiment of that data, determining which websites are producing greater or lesser volumes of data, identifying individual who are prone to discussing a brand, interacting with individuals contributing the social media data

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Social media research

• The application of scientific methods to social media data
• Like surveys, focus groups, and other established research methods, social media research incorporates the scientific principles that turn data into valid and reliable data sources, suitable for explaining past and current behaviour, and predicting future behaviour
• Established methods may include several of the following: developing research objectives, defining problems, defining and selecting relevant target groups and samples, applying sampling, weighting and standardized data quality methods, applying validation methods, evaluating data reliability
• Outputs include Usage and Attitudes studies, Brand Trackers, Ad Trackers, Segmentation studies, and other research traditionally using survey or focus group data

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1. by chris chobes

   On July 26, 2010 at 9:09 pm

   Hi there. Thoroughly enjoy reading about social media and, as an anthropology graduate, the conceptualization of social media research and social media monitoring. The question I ask may be easily answered (hopefully) but I’m wondering, where and how does the pratice ethnography fits into sm monitoring and sm research…does ethnography fluidly fit into both monitoring and research?
   Thanks for the awesome post and will keep reading

2. by Conversition Team

   On July 28, 2010 at 9:21 am

   Glad you liked it! Social media research takes many different forms. Some are more similar to quantitative research and others to qualitative research. Ethnography fits into both. You could say the differences lies in the sample sizes. Small scale social media research would involve more focused and individualized attention on the data. Large scale SMR, in the form of reviewing thousands or millions of conversations can’t apply ethnography in the traditional sense but can certainly apply the theory in a large scale, automated kind of way. In the end, you need to choose the style of ethnography that makes the most sense to you and run with it.

3. by Annelies Verhaeghe

   On August 13, 2010 at 2:49 am

   I could not agree more on the distinction between social media monitoring and social media research which we call social media netnography. Social media netnography can answer a whole set of reseach questions. It is a great tool for insight generation, can be used to measure the effectiveness of communication, evaluate new products or services and online branding. Too often people think that you can just conduct netnography without mentioning what you want to learn from it; It is like giving a briefing to a research agency saying that you want ‘a survey’ without stating the topic.

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