Goodmorning, I am a student who has to develop her thesis for a master's degree in marketing. I would like to analyze the phenomenon of newsjacking, used by brands on various social networks. I'd like to conduct a content analysis, both on Instagrm and on Facebook. Is it possible to do it on two different social networks within the same research?
Looking at content from different sources is definitely a common approach in CA. Once you have finished coding both sources, you can then look to see the similarities and differences in themes across the two contexts.
What you will need to be wary of is whether or not any differences that you might find are a result of differences in the medium, or in your selection of data, so you will need to apply the same inclusion / exclusion criteria on both IG and FB.
I am also conducting the same methodology for my PhD thesis. I think you need to justify why you will analyse contents from IG and FB. In relation to the previous answer, after your analysis of your content, you might discover contradictions in your themes and therefore might affect how you draw conclusions especially if these are platform specific (e.g. content on IG is more about the visual cue versus FB, length of media shared on IG versus FB). This will not be an issue if all your themes are not platform specific.
thank you Ryan for your suggestion! it will be very useful!
have a nice day
Hi Sara,
It is definitely possible, as already pointed out in previous answers. Before starting your empirical research I would suggest that you look in the what specificities the networks have and how they differ. This could already help you in formulating hypotheses of difference (if you work deductively).
Depending on your research question, you could also argue that the relevant specificities of the networks are sufficiently similar so that you can treat them as such. One of my favorite (really rigorous) marketing papers that did this recently is Gong, S., Zhang, J., Zhao, P., & Jiang, X. (2017). Tweeting as a Marketing Tool: A Field Experiment in the TV Industry. Journal of Marketing Research, 54(6), 833-850. doi:10.1509/jmr.14.0348
They treat Twitter and Weibo as similar. They even use the term "tweet" in the title, despite the fact that they did their experiments on Weibo. It was "good enough" for JMR, so I think that proceeding this way is very much acceptable.
Hope that helps!
Thank you very much for asking this Question Sara. Well I agree with Frederik Ferie. First, you should understand the different between these two social media applications. Although both of them are owned by the same firm, yet they operate differently. If I am not wrong, your purpose is to understand how companies promote or advertise their brands on these social media applications by taking advantage of content appearing on such applications. I suppose it’s a good idea to conduct a comparative content analysis by targeting two different social media applications ( in your case Instagram and Facebook). Good Luck. Go Ahead.
間違いなく可能です。実証研究を始める前に、ネットワークの具体的な特徴とそれらの違いを調べることをお勧めします。これはすでに差の仮説を立てるのに役立ちます（演繹的に作業する場合）。
研究の質問によっては、ネットワークの関連する特異性が十分に類似しているため、それらをそのように扱うことができると主張することもできます。
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