The second step is to define the search criteria. Table 2 shows the search criteria for the first part of this paper. The research applies five options, including period, channels, sentiment, language and excluded factors, for a business scenario. The period is the time frame for capturing the mentions from social media. For the original brand image, the research set four weeks as the period for analysis. For the social media channels, all three scenarios take Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as the data sources. For the sentiment and analysis, the brand image and competition use the positive, negative and neutral sentiment to get the whole picture of a brand in social media, while the crisis detection may look at the negative mentions which could be a contributing factor, or at comparisons. Also, the criteria have an excluded factors option, which can filter out unnecessary content. This research mainly filters out the feeds or comments generated by the companies themselves. For the analysis of the trends in 2020, country level data was obtained through Google Trends (https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=NZ), which may have limitations. The Google Trends data comes in a daily aggregated form.
Table 2: Search criteria