Social Media Analytics

Abstract

Many popular online social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook have become increasingly popular. In addition, a number of multimedia networks such as Flickr have also seen an increasing level of popularity in recent years. Many such social networks are extremely rich in content, and contain tremendous amount of content and linkage data which can be leveraged for analysis. The linkage data is essentially the graph structure of the social network and the communications between entities; whereas the content data contains the text, images and other multimedia data in the network. The growth of the usage and penetration of social media in the recent years has been enormous and unprecedented. This significant increase in its usage and increased number of users, there has been trend of a substantial increase in the volume of information generated by users of social media. Irrespective of primary domain in which organization is operating in to, whether it is insurance sector, social media (including facebook, twitter etc), medical science, banking etc. Virtually a large number of varying nature and services of organizations are making significant investments in social media. But it is also true that many are not systematically analyzing the valuable information that is resulting from their investments. This chapter aims at providing a data-centric view of online social networks; a topic which has been missing from much of the literature and to draw unanswered research issues which can be further explored to strengthen this area.