Research and Social Media Metrics

Resources
Website icon Research and Social Media Metrics Scoring Guide.
MS Excel icon Social Media Research Template.
Website icon Tour the Library.
Website icon RAILS.
Website icon Research Guide – MBA.
Website icon APA Style and Format.
Website icon Microsoft Office Software.
Website icon Can I Use Wikipedia?
Website icon Writing Feedback Tool.
Activity Context
This assignment helps you develop the skills to master the following course competencies:

Demonstrate the use of tools that support business management, analysis, and decision making.
Communicate in a manner that is professional and consistent with expectations for members of the business professions.
In this assignment, conduct research on the social media presence of your selected company and two of its competitors to answer questions and gather quantitative data to be entered into an Excel spreadsheet template.

Activity Instructions
Conduct an audit of your chosen company’s Facebook, Twitter, and one other social media platform. Include qualitative and quantitative measures of each. In addition, research the social media activities of two direct competitors of your company. Once you have done your research, open the Social Media Research Template (linked in the Resources), and fully complete the appropriate cells in each of the two tabs.

Tab 1: Questions

Answer each of the questions and fill in all their associated cells in the first tab. Provide sources in APA format, and discuss (in detail) why the sources you found were or were not credible. Note: Do not use the same Web site or other single source for all questions; instead use at least 3 different resources.

Tab 2: Quantitative Data

Complete the cells for your selected company and two of its competitors. Include data for Facebook, Twitter, and your choice for the third social media platform (LinkedIn, Instagram, or a different one).

Notice that for Facebook and Twitter, computations will automatically be made by the template. For your chosen media platform you will need to replicate the function for the four cells in the “Competitor Average” that makes the same computations found in the Facebook and Twitter “Competitor Average” entries.

Submission Requirements
Number of resources: Use at least three different resources.
APA formatting: Resources and citations are formatted according to APA style and formatting.
Complete both tabs of the Excel spreadsheet and submit the file for grading.

Optional Help – Brushing Up on Skills
The purpose of this assignment is to help you learn to search for information that helps you form opinions and support or refute ideas. Supporting your ideas and assertions with properly cited evidence is important for a variety of reasons, including:

Citing references gives credit where credit is due, giving the original authors credit for their words and ideas.
Citing sources shows support for (or even that you considered opposition to) the ideas that you present, giving your arguments more validity and credibility.
Citing references provides readers with sources they can explore to learn more about the ideas that you present.
Use the information provided with this assignment (linked in the Resources) to help you search in the library, evaluate your sources, and properly cite each source.

If you have not used an online research library recently, you will want to access Capella’s Tour the Library presentation. Remember the RAILS resources from the second study in this unit.
To brush up on your search skills, review the Research Guide – MBA.
To brush up on your APA formatting skills, read the APA Style and Format page on iGuide. To brush up on your skills in MS Excel, use the Microsoft Tutorials page on iGuide.
For a better understanding of when to use Wikipedia, read Can I Use Wikipedia?
Note: Your instructor may also use the Writing Feedback Tool to provide feedback on your writing. In the tool, click the linked resources for helpful writing information.