200123 What is social media analytics?

Social Media and Social Network

Social media nowadays offers a platform to exchange information among different individuals through various kinds of techniques. While in ancient times, technology was not that advanced so the traditional social media tended to be information deliverer and the masses could hardly share information with one another and express opinions and demands in social media. Thanks to the rapid development of the Internet, humans are able to communicate freely, receive and send information fast and conveniently in mobile applications.

social network is consist of actors (individuals , organizations or societies) and social interactions.[1] Social media, the Internet and advanced communication techniques have greatly changed our social networking behaviors. In general, social network is built based on entities and interactions, social media is the platform and tool used to build social network. At the same time, the establishment of social network will also lead the development of social media.

Social Media analytics in two aspects

Social media analytics is interdisciplinary and it refers to both humanities and technologies. But I am trying to explore it in two aspects-science and engineering.

First of all, in the science aspect, the main aim is to study the social behavior of humans. we have to admit that in virtual world, communication and sharing have become easier because the way has changed. We have avoided the embarrassment of face-to-face communication through likes and comments in instagram and we feel free to share our ideas or daily life through not only words, but also pictures and videos in instagram. Sometimes we can find ‘similar’ person who has the same hobbies with us and we follow him/her in instagram, since birds of a feather flock together. Besides, when we travel to a new place, we would like to tell our friends where we are by sending location tag to them in Facebook and view the comments our friends have made in the places we visit.

Then, it is going to the engineering aspect. To begin with, a good social media application must build appealing function or system that make users’ social activities more interesting or convenient. For example, the filter and beauty function in instagram make us feel more confident and more likely to share pictures or selfies in social media. It is realized by face recognition, image processing algorithm and some other techniques. Besides, the recommendation function helps us quickly find people we may be interested in by recording our searching history and big data analysis. Moreover, we can easily share our locations and find others’ footprints in Facebook by GPS and IP geolocation technology.

Conclusion

In conclusion, in my viewpoint, social media analyst aims to study human’s social behaviors and discover more useful products or application functions to make information exchange easier through various kinds of techniques. It refers to not only information engineering technology, but also psychology and humanities.

References

[1].https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network