DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Introduction
One of the oldest forms of Marketing Research is Discourse Analysis, the study of the written word. With the advent of Social Media it has given marketers, the opportunity to capture real time conversations. Understanding how people will talk about your brand/product/category can be very insightful and help to uncover new territories for the brand.
Tools to be used
Keywords Discovery
List all the names for the product and the category, using Google Search Insights (Similar Search) you will also uncover other words that people use to search for you product. Create a list of these words.
Social Media Mining
Once you have worked out your keywords it is now time to mine Social Media sites to find out what people are saying around these topics. The important thing here is to look out for common themes, start transferring all the data to an excel spreadsheet, using common theme tags to highlight the theme.
There are a number of great tools that you can use to do this.
OpenFacebook - Allows you to see what people have been writing in their Facebook Status Updates, it is estimated that about 3% of the FB population have open accounts, this still gives a good idea of how people are speaking about the product.
Example – Pens
Twiter Search - Check the search terms in twitter, the great thing about Twitter is that it shows the most tweeted tweets using those key terms. This will help uncover the common themes.
Example – Pens
Facebook Search - One of the great things about Facebook is that anyone can set up a Page/Group, what has happened is that a number of people have set up what is called 'Statement Pages' which are small everyday truths. Understanding what people agree on around a topic can be very insightful. Use the search bar and then narrow the search by looking at ‘Groups and Pages’ for those keywords.
Example – Pens
