Introduction to Social Media Analytics
Gohar F. Khan · 2023
Social Media Analytics is the art and science of extracting valuable hidden insights from vast amounts of semi-structured and unstructured social media data to enable informed and insightful decision-making. The main premise of social media analytics is to enable informed and insightful decision making by leveraging social media data. While the premise of both social media and traditional business analytics is to produce actionable business, they do however slightly differ in scope and nature. The chapter provides a comparison of social media analytics with traditional business analytics. Social media at a minimum has eight layers of data. Each layer carries potentially valuable information and insights that can be harvested for business intelligence purposes. These layers include text, networks, actions, hyperlinks, mobile, location, multimedia, and search engines. Like any kind of business analytics, social media analytics can take four forms: descriptive analytics, diagnostic analytics, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics.