A Network Analysis Process:
1. Subscribe to a social media monitoring service with a very hefty set of data (i.e.- Brandwatch)
2. Create an accurate query within this monitoring solution related to your marketplace. Date this query back 24 months. The goal with this step is to discover the largest networks (pages, groups, authors) related to a marketplace.
3. Go to the Export function within the monitoring solution and export the entire data set related to your 24 month query. Every row.
4. Isolate ONLY the Twitter results in an Excel document. In addition, isolate ONLY the Facebook results (in Excel).
5. Subscribe to Full Contact API ( https://www.fullcontact.com/developer/ ) at the highest level you can afford.
6. Download the Full Contact Person Enrichment Template (FCPET) from Full Contact API.
7. Set the Seed at 3 or above (in the FCPET document). Set the source to either Twitter Handle or Facebook ID.
8. Ensure you have a rock solid Internet connection.
9. Paste all Twitter handles from the data export into the first column of the FCPET document. Run the append.
10. Paste all FB handles from the data export into the first column of a second fresh FCPET document. Run the append.
11. Keep the results in the FCPET in exact order from the Brandwatch data export. This is so you can paste in a few columns from the Brandwatch export, such as sample mentions, account type (Individual or Organization), gender, etc.
12. Hire an analyst to meticulously go over the resulting spreadsheets and clean out the junk and spam authors. Use other tools, such as Melissa Data ( http://www.melissadata.com/ ) and Intelius ( https://www.intelius.com/ ) to append more data in additional columns.
13. Organize by Impact score (Brandwatch) or by Region or by any other criteria important to you (use the Data sort function in Excel to do this).
You can use the final sheet to plan content-marketing, derive insights on markets, and understand competitor activity. You can also determine the “real people” talking about your brand using this approach.