Book Image

Learning Social Media Analytics with R

By : Dipanjan Sarkar, Karthik Ganapathy, Raghav Bali, Tushar Sharma
Book Image

Learning Social Media Analytics with R

By: Dipanjan Sarkar, Karthik Ganapathy, Raghav Bali, Tushar Sharma

Overview of this book

The Internet has truly become humongous, especially with the rise of various forms of social media in the last decade, which give users a platform to express themselves and also communicate and collaborate with each other. This book will help the reader to understand the current social media landscape and to learn how analytics can be leveraged to derive insights from it. This data can be analyzed to gain valuable insights into the behavior and engagement of users, organizations, businesses, and brands. It will help readers frame business problems and solve them using social data. The book will also cover several practical real-world use cases on social media using R and its advanced packages to utilize data science methodologies such as sentiment analysis, topic modeling, text summarization, recommendation systems, social network analysis, classification, and clustering. This will enable readers to learn different hands-on approaches to obtain data from diverse social media sources such as Twitter and Facebook. It will also show readers how to establish detailed workflows to process, visualize, and analyze data to transform social data into actionable insights.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Social Media Analytics with R
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Understanding Twitter


Twitter's initial design. Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jackdorsey/182613360/

Born in 2006, Twitter is a social networking cum online news service which enables its users to share content in bursts of 140 characters. Over the years, it has evolved like any other successful thing on the Internet and added and/or removed features. Our aim in this chapter is to understand different aspects of this service and use them to draw different insights or solve business problems.

Tip

Twitter was the brainchild of Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. It started as the SMS of the Internet with very simple ideas. You can read the interesting story of its inception here: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/twitter-creator.html

As discussed in the previous chapter, social networks are far reaching and dynamic. Twitter allows users to share information using text, images, videos, GIFs, links, hash tags, handles and so on from a variety of sources...