Social media mining

Social media mining is the process of representing, analyzing, and extracting actionable patterns and trends from raw social media data. The term "mining" is an analogy to the resource extraction process of mining for rare minerals. Resource extraction mining requires mining companies to sift through vast quanitites of raw ore to find the precious minerals; likewise, social media "mining" requires human data analysts and automated software programs to sift through massive amounts of raw social media data (e.g., on social media usage, online behaviours, sharing of content, connections between individuals, online buying behaviour, etc.) in order to discern patterns and trends. These patterns and trends are of interest to companies, governments and not-for-profit organizations, as these organizations can use these patterns and trends to design their strategies or introduce new programs (or, for companies, new products, processes and services).

Social media mining uses a range of basic concepts from computer science, data mining, machine learning and statistics. Social media miners develop algorithms suitable for investigating massive files of social media data. Social media mining is based on theories and methodologies from social network analysis, network science, sociology, ethnography, optimization and mathematics. It encompasses the tools to formally represent, measure, model, and mine meaningful patterns from large-scale social media data. In the 2010s, major corporations, as well as governments and not-for-profit organizations engage in social media mining to find out more about key populations of interest, which, depending on the organization carrying out the "mining", may be customers, clients, or citizens.

As defined by Kaplan and Haenlein, social media is the "group of internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content." There are many categories of social media including, but not limited to, social networking (Facebook or LinkedIn), microblogging (Twitter), photo sharing (Flickr, Photobucket, or Picasa), news aggregation (Google reader, StumbleUpon, or Feedburner), video sharing (YouTube, MetaCafe), livecasting (Ustream or Twitch.tv), virtual worlds (Kaneva), social gaming (World ofWarcraft), social search (Google, Bing, or Ask.com), and instant messaging (Google Talk, Skype, or Yahoo! messenger).

...
Wikipedia