Engaging with communities of interest is an essential component to building a comprehensive social and content marketing strategy but the first step is to identify communities of interest that have an influence on your target audience. Marketers can learn from COIs the people, places and content that influence their consumer's buying behavior. These 10 best practices on how to conduct COI research will help guide marketers in identifying the right places in which they can connect with their target audience.

1. R2integrated
10 Best Practices for
Communities of Interest Research

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COMMUNITIES
OF INTEREST
RESEARCH
The process of discovering the
online communities where your
audience spends their time
consuming content, interacting
with peers and engaging in
decision-making behavior.
READ OUR BLOG POST FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO COI RESEARCH

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COI Research Best Practice #1
Determine your audience before you do the research.
Define your target as much as you can before beginning a COI
research project - this will allow you to stay focused and relevant with
findings and applicable insights.
READ OUR BLOG POST FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO COI RESEARCH

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COI Research Best Practice #2
Create a search scope.
A search scope is a set of keywords that is relevant to your brand
and/or product. Define this set of keywords before you do your
research, and then use the search scope to find relevant communities.
READ OUR BLOG POST FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO COI RESEARCH

5. 55
COI Research Best Practice #3
Create an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of your
research.
Include a mix of qualitative and quantitative classifications such as COI
name, COI URL, platform, top content types, audience segment, traffic
ranking, and inbound link volume.
READ OUR BLOG POST FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO COI RESEARCH

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COI Research Best Practice #4
Start with Google.
Search engines are the best way to start your research. Just type in
your keyword string (from your search scope) and go. As you get
deeper into the research, you'll start to understand what you are really
looking for.
READ OUR BLOG POST FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO COI RESEARCH

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COI Research Best Practice #5
Custom search engines and filters are your best friend.
Use custom search engines, such as Board Reader and Blekko to tap
into specific types of communities. Use search filters to target your
research, such as date ranges, blog filters, discussion filters, and other
community criteria.
READ OUR BLOG POST FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO COI RESEARCH

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COI Research Best Practice #6
Only include COIs which have published content recently.
Outdated COIs will still come up in search engines, however they won't
be useful as part of your research set. You can adjust the date ranges
for published content in the search engine options.
READ OUR BLOG POST FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO COI RESEARCH

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COI Research Best Practice #7
Keep an eye out for competitors in the communities, and
don't exclude competitor-owned communities of interest.
This will allow you to better understand the industry and how
competition will impact your marketing strategy.
READ OUR BLOG POST FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO COI RESEARCH

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COI Research Best Practice #8
Spidering: Use COIs to find more COIs.
With some COIs you can use a technique called "spidering" to
discover additional COIs. For example, most blogs have blog rolls (a
list of related/favorite blogs) and these are a goldmine for finding
additional COIs.
READ OUR BLOG POST FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO COI RESEARCH

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COI Research Best Practice #9
Keep track of why you chose each COI in the first place.
After identifying a long list of communities of interest, you may forget
your original intention behind choosing certain COIs. Keep a column in
your Excel spreadsheet titled "Why this COI matters" and fill it out
while you do your research.
READ OUR BLOG POST FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO COI RESEARCH

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COI Research Best Practice #10
Use free traffic and inbound link ranking sites to gather
quantitative criteria to help evaluate your COIs.
Sites like Compete.com, Alexa.com, OpenSiteExplorer.org and others
will allow you to include some quantitative data points to determine
things like reach, content value and site popularity.
READ OUR BLOG POST FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO COI RESEARCH

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RESEARCH?
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READ OUR BLOG POST FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO COI RESEARCH