Social Media Data Analysis Essay

Zeng et al. (2010) define social media analytics as follows:
Social media analytics is concerned with developing and evaluating informatics tools and frameworks to collect, monitor, analyze, summarize, and visualize social media data, usually driven by specific requirements from a target application
Social media analysis involves processing huge amounts of unstructured data to gain useful insights, in order to do this, various data collection and analysis tools and techniques have to be utilized. These techniques are based on three fundamental models, namely, statistical models, survey models and prediction market models.
Statistical Methods
Data analysis through statistical methods form the basis for predicting relationships between different

Data mining when used in conjunction with social media can clearly identify “groups” of people amongst the entire population, bring out their opinions on a subject, study how the group preferences change over time-and at the pace they change, and also recommend product and service offerings that fall within their area of

These groups are then classified into profiles and then further assessed. This is especially helpful in bringing out similarities and patterns in user lifestyles, interests and habits and how they change over time. For example, this can help brands to help segment the customers in various groups or clusters and then develop specific social marketing strategies for each cluster. This can easily reflect the variations in consumer tastes across a range of parameters including age, geographic location and social