Social media analytics

Social Media Analytics as a part of social analytics is the process of gathering data from stakeholder conversations on digital media and processing into structured insights leading to more information-driven business decisions and increased customer centrality for brands and businesses.

"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. It is a science, as it involves systematically identifying, extracting, and analyzing social media data (such as tweets, shares, likes, and hyperlinks) using sophisticated tools and techniques. It is also an art, interpreting and aligning the insights gained with business goals and objectives. To get value from analytics, one should master both its art and science."

Social media analytics is an interdisciplinary area that is used in social science and computer sciences interchangeably. Social media analytics provide a human trace to the social scientist which could be used in wide spectrum of disciplines such as sociology, political sciences, and geology. Social media provides two broad contexts from social scientist perspective; it provides a wide range of data in already well established social science subjects such as political sciences and sociology, and social media sometimes is seen as a fundamental change in underlying assumptions of the social theory. Political scientists can follow unfolding political protest online and the exchange of information between communities of different languages. Meanwhile, it is very difficult to connect the social scientific understanding of social to social media data. For example, the concept of conventional friendship hardly applies to the concept of friendship in social media.

Social media at a minimum has seven layers of data. Out of the seven layers, some are visible or easily identifiable (e.g., text and actions), and other are invisible (e.g., social media and hyperlink networks).

Social media analytics can also be referred as social media listening, social media monitoring or social media intelligence.

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Wikipedia