What is Social Media Analytics?

Imagine you are using app dianping.com at the end of the year, and here comes a summarize of your usage of this app in the whole year. You can check who ‘liked’ your evaluation to the restaurants most, and who commented your evaluation most. Well this is a siImagine you are using dianping.com at the end the year, and here comes a summarize of your usage in this website around the whole year. You can check who ‘liked’ your evaluation to the restaurants most, and who commented your evaluation most. Well, this is just a simple example about social media analytics.

So what is social media analytics?

First, we need to know what the social media are.

Social Media

According to Wikipedia, social media are defined as “interactive computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation or sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks.”[1][2] Hmm, seems a little abstract.

Let’s put it in another way. Engaging with electronic services like laptops and smartphones, users create interactive platforms where other people can discuss, share, modify and co-create user-generated or self-generated content posted online. In other words, everyone can be the protagonist in the social media.

There are several social media services that have the number of users of over 100 million, such as Facebook, YouTube, WeChat, Instagram and Baidu Tieba, etc.

Social Media Analytics

Social media analytics is defined as the process of acquiring and analyzing data from social network.[3] In other words, your information on social media services will be collected for analysis, and an incredible result may come out from these data.

For example, you subscribe some kinds of videos, and you may receive a summary that tells you what your character are.

Actually, there are some social media services that provides basic data analytics, such as Twitter Analytics, LinkedIn Analytics, Bilibili Analytics and Instagram Sights.[4]

Process for Social Media Analytics

There are three steps for social media analytics:

1. Data identification: The process of identifying a subset of the available data for analysis. The features of data, such as structure, language, region, type of content, venue, time and ownership of data, need to be considered.[5]
2. Data analysis: The activities that assist in transforming the original data into insight. This step starts once we know what problem we are going to solve and we have prepared sufficient data for converting them into a meaningful result. Also, a model is needed for organizing data and standardizing how the individual data relate to each other. It is handy to have several tools available to gain a fresh perspective on discussions around the topic, which will be mentioned below.[5]
3. Information interpretation: The step to output the results. As the receivers are usually without technical knowledge, the way of showing the data becomes significant for them to realize the outcomes easily. The best answer of this question is always the visualization.[5]

Social Media Analytics Tools

Well, it’s hard to recommend the tools for social media analytics, for I haven’t use them, and most of the recommendations on the Internet are for commercial purposes. So I just set several examples of good deeds for you to follow.

1. Google Analytics: The go-to analytics tool for the website. It provides a variety of valuable information about how your customers interact with your company online, which can be found in Social Pages report.
2. Audiense: The tool to help you understand your Twitter audience better, so that you can create more targeted campaigns and earn more money from advertisements. The characteristics, the interests and the location of audience can be clearly shown in this tool.

Thanks for reading my blog!

References

[1] Kietzmann, Jan H.; Kristopher Hermkens (2011). “Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media”. Business Horizons (Submitted manuscript). 54 (3): 241–251.

[2] Obar, Jonathan A.; Wildman, Steve (2015). “Social media definition and the governance challenge: An introduction to the special issue”. Telecommunications Policy. 39 (9): 745–750.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_analytics

[4] https://buffer.com/library/social-media-analytics-tools

[5] Ganis, Matthew; Kohirkar, Avinash (2015). Social media Analytics: Techniques and insights for Extracting Business Value Out of Social Media. New York: IBM Press. pp. 40–137. ISBN 978-0-13-389256-7.