Your dream home awaits. It’s located in a place with top schools, friendly neighbors and a warm, welcoming, safe environment. But how do you find this comforting scenario? And does it come with a dog? It’s all about the upfront research.

When it’s time for your brand to move into the social media neighborhood, the same research is needed. Sure, it’s not about schools or crime rate, but there are plenty of environmental factors. What is the competition doing in this space? What is the overall industry landscape? Before you start marking up your social media blueprint, it’s important to understand the space around you. A clear understanding of the landscape will enable you to find the open space for your brand to take residence. It’s not a dream, really. How do we find it? Let’s start the house hunt.

The social landscape

Your industry’s social media enviroment is unique. It could be a growing space or a completely inundated one. So scour the social web to understand what your industry is doing. The secondary research of blogs and articles helps but that’s much like reading the real estate magazines. You need to visit some open houses and do your own primary research! Dive into Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs, YouTube, Forums, Foursquare, etc. The question about the industry is not just are they doing something, but what are they doing? Is it working?

The next step is looking at your direct competition in the same light. You may have a deeper understanding of their motives so you can jump right to the heavy research. Here are some questions to keep in mind when looking at the landscape:

• What social media platforms are they using?
• How are they using them? Is one touting offers while another is a customer service arm? Is there consistency between the platforms? Why or why not?
• More than how many followers or “likes” they have, how are they engaging with their community, if at all?

The brand’s current home

Now, we turn the inspection on ourselves. Whether you’ve been delving in social media for years or you haven’t started yet, truly look at the landscape around your brand. Be a scrutinizing home inspector and look in every crack and crevice. It will only help you learn and grow. Here are some key metrics for your tool belt.

• Share of Voice. This is the amount of weight your brand has in the marketplace. It measures the direct mentions of your brand compared to the competition or industry. Conversations around your brand are happening whether you’re in the space or not. Therefore, this is a good first step to understand the buzz. SocialMediaToday has a great post about share of voice.
• Share of Conversation. This metric takes share of voice a bit further. Defined by Marcel Lebrun on his blog as “…The degree to which a brand is associated with the problem or need that it is setting out to help with.” Technically, it’s the number of conversations which are on-topic for your given subject against the subset of news articles which also mention your topic and then divide by the whole. Pretty cool, right?
• Sentiment Analysis. This is all about attitude. How is your community feeling with respect to your brand? Sentiment is more than just positive, negative or neutral. What do they believe? What makes them tick? It’s all about understanding your audience. SmartBlog discusses this in a recent blog post.

The brand dream home

You’re so close you can almost smell the fresh cut grass. Now that you know what your industry and competition are doing and not doing, you can start to carve out a space for yourself. There is an opportunity in every outlet, you just have to find it. Perhaps your competition is blasting messages out via Twitter but not engaging in conversations with their followers. Or maybe Facebook is more of a selling tool versus a community tool. Find that space. That is the dream home.

Welcome to the social media neighborhood.

What other auditing tricks do you carry? Are there additional metrics you look at when finding the open space? What does your social media dream home look like? Share it all!

Tags: Marcel LeBrun, Sentiment analysis, share of conversation, share of voice, smartblog, social media metrics, socialmediatoday