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

Accessing Facebook data


You will find a lot of content in several books and on the web about various techniques to access and retrieve data from Facebook. There are several official ways of doing this, which include using the Facebook Graph API either directly through low level HTTP based calls or indirectly through higher level abstract interfaces belonging to libraries like Rfacebook.

Note

Some alternative ways of retrieving Facebook data would be to use registered applications on Facebook like Netvizz or the GetNet applications built by Lada Adamic, used in her very popular Social Network Analysis course. (Unfortunately http://snacourse.com/getnet has not worked since Facebook completely changed its API access permissions and privacy settings).

Unofficial ways include techniques like web scraping and crawling to extract data. Do note though that Facebook considers this to be a violation of its terms and conditions of accessing data and you should try and avoid crawling Facebook for data...