An Introduction to Social Media Analytics

Social Media Analytics is the art and science of extracting valuable insights from vast amounts of semi-structured and unstructured social media data to enable informed and insightful decision-making. This chapter examines this new and constantly emerging field that continues to evolve as social media matures. The science part of social media analytics requires a combination of skilled data analysts, sophisticated tools and technologies, and reliable/cleaned data. Social media network analytics extract, analyze, and interpret personal and professional social networks, for example, Facebook, and Twitter. Like any business analytics, social media analytics can take three forms: descriptive analytics, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics. The identification stage is the art part of Social Media Analytics and is concerned with searching and identifying the right source of information for analytical purposes. Social Media Analytics tools are being constantly developed to keep up with the growing need to extract, clean, and analyze the vast amount of social media data.