Content Analysis: The implementation of quality messages in commercial social media strategies

03Aug11

Research Question: Is quality valued over quantity in social media strategies as implemented by

companies, where quality is defined by how informative a post is and quantity is defined by number of

posts without valuable content?

Hypothesis: In commercial social media strategies, quality is valued over quantity.

Methodological Framework and Unit of Analysis: For this analysis, I will look at three different companies’ social media, which include Facebook and Twitter, totaling six social media pages to analyze.

For the purpose of this content analysis, the word “post” refers to the complete and individual Facebook update, Facebook response, Tweet, or Twitter response by the company. If a post was in response to another user it was recorded as such, though created no difference in coding. The two largest companies, Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks, were chosen for their overwhelming presence in the industry and the smaller company, Guy & Gallard, was chosen based on familiarity and is meant as a comparison to the larger companies. The coffee industry was chosen because it has few major players and only one unique brand per company.

For each company’s social media page, each individual post is exported with the date of the post, the post itself, and if it is in response to another user’s post. For the three Twitter pages, I used an export tool called Searchtastic.com and exported all tweets by the company between February 1, 2011 and February 28, 2011. These dates are kept constant for all six texts so as to keep consistent with all social media posts across one month exactly. For Facebook, I input all posts and dates manually for this same date range.

Read full content analysis here.