Social Media Research Part 3: What’s next?

If you have read parts 1 and 2 of this series, then you’ll know that as part of the strategy to become the most active borough in the North by 2024, we have commissioned social media listening research to better understand the opinion of physical activity across Calderdale. If you haven't caught up, be sure to read, Part 1: Finding new solutions for Calderdale & Part 2: Our Findings.

Limitations and Possibilities

Before understanding the next steps, it’s important to consider the limitations and possibilities of the data set we have collected:

• The inability to accurately track location data means that we’re unlikely to ever pick up on all of the mentions of physical activity in the borough

• There is a need to widen our focus to include institutions and organisations of Calderdale – our current and/or potential stakeholders

• The grouping of local government accounts vs. everyone else is still valid and will enable us to look at both inputs and outcomes in from real conversations

How we will adapt going forward

With this in mind, we will expand social media market research going forward, but we will be much more focused in what we are looking for:

• We will monitor all of the institutions and organisations that we can: using the data we’ve already collected, as well as through a thorough stakeholder analysis, we will be able to create a bigger database of accounts to follow online. These accounts will be split into our areas of focus:

  
  

  • Health and social care

  • Workplaces

  • Sports clubs and activity providers

  • Leisure providers

  • Parks and open spaces

  • Education

  • Voluntary and community

  • Infrastructure and planning

  
  

• We will then be able to monitor how much they’re talking about physical activity over time and importantly how our evolving active programmes increase the narrative around physical activity.

• We can use the insights to compare between focus areas, which have the highest number of mentions? What types of keywords are they using compared to others? Which are the most influential in terms of retweets and engagement? We can track the word clouds within each sector to understand language change over time.

• Monitor any campaigns that are set up by active Calderdale, devise Key Performance Measures and Indications (KPI’s) to monitor their impact and effectiveness.

• Continue to run the original search query (adding more terms) to gather new authors, hashtags and more that can feed into campaigns going forward.

This is a large and hugely insightful piece of work, which will require constant updating along the way as we learn more. We are confident that it will arm us with the most up to date insight on how well we’re able to embed the physical activity agenda within institutions and groups across the borough.

This project is new to Calderdale, so there will be updates at each new milestone, keep up to date with our blog to find out more in the future.