Social Media Analytics (SMA)
There is an increasing shift toward online lifestyle and remote work and even before COVID 19, social media had already become deeply ingrained in daily life. According to a study, approximately 3.2 billion people are active social media users, spending an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes daily on Facebook, 40 minutes on YouTube, 30 minutes on Snapchat, 28 minutes on Instagram, and 14 minutes on Pinterest.The extent of our dependence on social media was starkly highlighted by Facebook’s (owned by Meta) outage on October 4, 2021. Although, the disruption was only for six to seven hours, its effects were far-reaching in terms of heavy shift towards other social media alternative platforms. With Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp temporarily inaccessible on 04 October, 2021, many users turned to Twitter, Gmail, Telegram and Snapchat, underscoring how vital these services have become to our daily routines.
Concepts to Know
We will learn some important terms and definitions that are essential for social media analytics.
Social Media
The term “social media” is combination of two terms "social" and "media". In a singular form, was initially used in the beginning of 21st century to describe content and Internet-based applications that can be continuously modified by users through their interactive participation and collaboration.
Digital platforms that provides interaction facility between people. For example, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram etc.
Blogs
Blogs are discussions in these forms: written, image, audios, and are often authored by someone with deep knowledge in the relevant field.
Microblog
A microblog is a category of blog that allows smaller chunks of content to be posted that is lesser in size of a regular blog.
Content
Write-up, audio visuals, images and other related material available on digital platforms e.g. Websites and social media platforms offer a plenty of content for users.
User Generated Content (UGC)
Three aspects of user generated contents can define social media-- users create their public profiles. Secondly, users connect with others to construct a network. Lastly, users can
see other users’ activities and interact with them.
Tools and Metrics
Followings are some important social media analytics tools and Metrics
Tools
Google analytics, Hootsuite, Sendible, Buzzsumo, Sprout Social, Meltwater, Keyhole are some of the tools that help monitoring social media platforms. These are advance programmed applications that gather data from the social media platforms, analyze and generate useful information using multiple desirable metrics.
Metrics
Social media platforms use variety of metrics. For example, LinkedIn use "impression", "search appearance", "Followers". Some of these measures are common for example, Twitter (now X) and Facebook both use "followers" to assess the influence of user or "reach" of social media posts. Reach is another metric that is obtained by combining numbers of followers and message. "Connection" is another popular simple measure reflecting number of people connected to a user profile.
Applications
Social media analytics have a variety of application including education, business, healthcare and more. Youth dating apps, gaming apps are examples of sports and increasing application of social media in real world relations. Governments use social media handle to influence people for voter turn out. One of the burning example of application in political campaigns can be understood by the election influences generated by Facebook and Twitter.