Social Media Intelligence (Virtual Course)
Our 2.5-day Social Media Intelligence course will help you find and monitor the sources, topics and targets of interest to you using low-cost / no-cost solutions. We'll demonstrate how to harvest data from popular social networks discretely and without jeopardising your identity. We'll also show you how to leverage the insights, signals and analysis provided by a rapidly growing constellation of blogs, newsletters and communities.
Course Outline
Introduction and Requirements Planning
Introduction to Social Media Intelligence
- Introduction to social media: history and evolution
- Introduction to social media intelligence
- A typology of social media sources
- A typology of SOCMINT strategies
Requirements Planning
- Defining your intelligence requirements
- Building and maintaining your keyword index
- Working with hashtags and emojis
Setup and Security
- Browser set up and configuration
- Essential browser extensions
- AI workplace setup
- OPSEC for SOCMINT practitioners
Working with Blogs and Microblogging Platforms
Working with Blogs
- Blog / newsletter discovery
- Working with major blogging platforms
- Monitoring a blog's content
- Mapping a blogger's online footprint
- Analysing a blogger's reach and influence
Working with Microblogging Platforms
- Introduction to microblogging
- Microblogging platforms as intelligence networks
- Microblogging platforms as search engines
- Searching and monitoring Bluesky
- Searching and monitoring Threads
- Searching and monitoring Mastodon
Monitoring Popular Social Networks
Working with Western Social Media Channels
- Generic source / profile discovery guidance
- Finding and monitoring Instagram profiles
- Finding and monitoring TikTok profiles
- Finding and monitoring Facebook pages
- Finding and monitoring Telegram channels
Working with Non-Western Social Media Channels
- Mapping the world's social media preferences
- Finding and monitoring non-Western channels
- Case study: VK, Dzen, Rutube
- Case study: Sina Weibo, Bilibili, Douyin
- Working with data scrapers
Monitoring Online Communities
Working with Communities and Forums
- Finding and monitoring:
- Online communities
- Forums and discussion boards
- Reddit channels
- Chan sites
- Discord channels
- Scraping community data
- Analysing the data for insights
Videos and Podcasts
Working with Video Sharing Platforms
- Working with popular video hosting sites
- Finding video content / channels via the surface web
- Finding video content / channels via the social web
- Monitoring video platforms, channels and users
- Generating video transcripts and summaries
Working with Podcasts
- Finding podcast channels via the web
- Working with podcast directories
- Monitoring podcast channels
- Generating transcripts and summaries
Course Details
Who is this Course For?
This course is intended for anyone engaged in online research, including intelligence, security and law enforcement personnel, journalists, investigators, cybersecurity practitioners, and business analysts.
How You Benefit
On completion of this course you will have the ability to:
- Clarity for your social media intelligence requirements
- Build a web-based media monitoring dashboard
- Monitor a global network of social media sources
- Process the flow of realtime information
- Use AI tools to support data analysis
- Optimise your organisation’s monitoring efforts
What You Receive
- A certificate of completion
- A full set of course slides / user guides in PDF
- Templates to support requirements planning
- Templates to support keyword indexing
- Tip sheets and cheat sheets to enable rapid learning
- Six months of post-course support
Course Fee
EUR 1,300
Course Prerequisites
We recommend that participants wishing to take this course first complete our OSINT: Foundations course to ensure they understand the technical standards and operating principles that underpin our approach to data collection and analysis.
The course assumes you are familiar with generic OSINT workflows (requirements planning, keywords indexing, data collation, etc.) and have a good working knowledge of major search engines. We also assume you are familiar with the principles of online security.
TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
Please observe the following technical requirements:
- You will need a Windows or Mac laptop (tablet computers are not recommended)
- Install Google Chrome
- Install Microsoft Office
- Install Zoom
- Set up a Google account to facilitate the use of online tools
- A second monitor is recommended but not essential
Additional software requirements will be sent prior to the start of the course.
