Data integrity is important especially if critical business decisions are based off on data. To that extent, in this post, I’ll write about five data collection tips to help you have accurate data for “social media analytics”. So here are the tips that are applicable to social media analytics irrespective of the tool you are using:

1. Social Media Platform

Select the right social media platform for capturing data. You do not want to select few such that you miss data.And you do want to select irrelevant social media platforms because if you do, then you’ll introduce noise in the data. Let me take an example. If your project needs to be based on USA only then you do not need to add “sina weibo” (Chinese social network) in your social media sources.

Now, Based on your business need for “social media analytics” campaign, you should test all possible social media platforms – you never know who might be talking about things that you are interested in. After you have selected the right social media platforms for your project, let’s go the next step:

2. “Search Keyword” Selection

Some of the social media platforms let’s you collect data via “search keywords”. Like twitter allows you to collect data via “hashtags” and/or keywords. So if you want to collect data about all social media posts having “american airlines” then you should not collect data using:

AMERICAN OR Airlines:

If you select the above rule, then it will introduce a LOT of noise because we’ll collect data people talking about just “American” PLUS data about people talking about just “airlines”. That’s bad!  What you want is rules like these:

1. American AND airlines

2. “American Airlines” (as a phrase)

Now, I can’t stress the importance of selecting the right search keywords enough. Choosing wrong keywords will add noise that would be bad for analytics. So choose keywords such that you are not adding noise as well as not missing on conversations. There’s no secret formula here, continuous improvement is the way to go!

3. Language & country Filtering

Social networks are GLOBAL in nature and so it’s important to filter (or include) based on the project that you’re working on. Not doing so would add noise in your data. And also remember to include country and language because you do not want to miss out on conversations either.

Conclusion:

Three Data Collection Tips for Social media analytics that I shared in this post are:

1. Select Right Social Media Platform

2. Select Right search keywords

3. Select Right Country and Language.