ADARSH KUMAR TIWARI PGMB1903

1-Why it is important for business managers to understand and mine social media data?

Without sufficient data, it isn’t advisable to make decisions on social platforms. Simply put, before you go about
publishing a post on your company’s Facebook page, look at the numbers, check when your audience is online,
understand the type of content that is interacted with most often and don’t overlook the demographic insights of
your page. Social media platforms today offer marketer substantial amounts of data which can be used to make
marketing decisions in the future. Be it Facebook, Youtube or even Twitter, each of these platforms offer analytics
that point out key insights. As more and more companies pour social media into their marketing mixes, social
media intelligence is also turning tremendously popular.

There are few important points-

Predictive Analysis
Data mining gives much-needed impetus to draw predictions relating to consumer behavior. This prepares the
business processes to handle the future consumer move. It will reduce making non-productive decisions.
Example-By analyzing the social interaction, an e-commerce expert can predict that a customer of a certain
demographic buys a specific apparel. This insight helps them to manage inventory by phasing out the possibility
of over or under procurement.
Lower Costs and Improve Revenue
Data mining lowers the chances of immature business decisions by the constant flux of social data. This also
helps in near real-time issue solving and curb the odds of the brand image getting tarnished. The investment once
required to seek consumer complaints and grievances will also come down. It reduces the costs of the loyalty
programs and results in increased financial stability of the company.

Enforcing Governmental Regulations

Many urban development departments depend upon data mining techniques. To estimate the number of people
coming under the enforced regulations, they make use of social data obtained through mining. This helps them
choose the channels onto which the citizens are more active on. When they have enough information, they can
decide on the content format through which they can reach the users.

Creating Awareness
Social data can bring awareness to the public in the case of misconduct. If a fake handle gives the inappropriate
information, it difficult to track since the miscreant will not interact directly with the brand. Data mining can
grasp the first public mention of the issue in a span of seconds. This is where the inherent capabilities of a data
mining prove to be effective.

2-What is social media analytics, and how it is different from traditional business analytics?

Social media analytics is the practice of gathering data from social media websites and analyzing that data using
social media analytics tools to make business decisions. The most common use of social media analytics is to
mine customer sentiment to support marketing and customer service activities.

Here are a few of the reasons that there are immense differences between traditional and social media:

 Social media reaches a maximum audience, while traditional media’s audience is generally more targeted.
 Social media is versatile (you can make changes once published), whereas traditional media, once published, is
set in stone.
 Social media is immediate, while traditional can be delayed due to press times.
 Social media is a two-way conversation, and traditional is one-way.
 Social media often has unreliable demographic data, but traditional media’s is more accurate

3- Briefly explain the seven layers of social media data. Support your answer with
examples.

Netwo
rks
Apps Text
7 Layers
of Social
Search Media Action
Engin s
es Analytics
Locati Hyperli
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Layer One: Text

It deals with the extraction and analysis of business insights from textual elements of social media
content.Example: comments on facebook posts, tweets, blog posts, and Facebook status updates,
Instagram captions.

Layer Two: Networks

Social media network analytics extract, analyze, and interpret personal and professional social
networks.for example, Facebook, Friendship Network, and Twitter, Instagram.

Layer Three: Actions

Social media actions analytics deals with extracting, analyzing, and interpreting the actions performed by
social media users

Example- activities like likes, dislikes, shares, mentions, and endorsement, tags.

Layer Four: Apps

Apps analytics deals with measuring and optimizing user engagement with mobile applications.Example-
changing app interface and service according reviews or consumer behavior.

Layer Five: Hyperlinks

Hyperlink analytics is about extracting, analyzing, and interpreting social media hyperlinks Example- in-
links and out-links

Layer Six: Location

Location analytics, also known as spatial analysis or geospatial analytics, is concerned with mining and
mapping the locations of social media users, contents, and data.

Example- using location or geotags of the user to show them related ads of the local business.

Layer Seven: Search Engines

Search engines analytics focuses on analyzing historical search data for gaining a valuable insight into a
range of areas Example- trends analysis, keyword monitoring, search result and advertisement history,
and advertisement spending statistics.

4-Explain the social media analytics cycle.

 Identification

Interpretation Extraction

Visualization Cleaning

Analyzing

Step 1: Data Source Identification

Data source identification stage is concerned with searching and identifying the right source of
information for analytical purposes. Although, most of the data for analytics will come from business-
owned social media platforms, such as an official Twitter account, Facebook fan pages, blogs, and
YouTube channel. Some data for analytics, however, will also be harvested from nonofficial social media
platforms, such as Google search engine trends data or Twitter search stream data.

Step 2: Data Extraction

Once a reliable and mineable source of data are identified, next comes extraction of the data. Most of
the large-scale social media data extraction is done through an API (application programming interface).
Mostly, the social media analytics tools use API-based data mining. APIs, in simple words, are sets of
routines/protocols that social media service companies (e.g., Twitter and Facebook) have developed that
allow users to access small portions of data hosted in their databases.

Step 3: Cleaning
Next comes removing the unwanted data from the automatically extracted data. Some data may need
cleaning, while other data can go into analysis directly. In the case of the text analytics cleaning, coding,
clustering, and filtering may be needed to get rid of irrelevant textual data using natural language
processing (NPL).

Step 4: Analyzing the Data

At this stage, the clean data is analyzed for business insights. Depending on the layer of social media
analytics under consideration and the tools and algorithm employed, the steps and approach to take will
greatly vary. For example, nodes in a social media network can be clustered and visualized in a variety of
ways depending on the algorithm employed. The overall objective at this stage is to extract meaningful
insights without the data losing its integrity.

Step 5: Visualization
In addition to numerical results, most of the social media data will also result in visual outcomes. Effective
visualization is particularly helpful with complex and large data sets because it can reveal hidden
patterns, relationships, and trends. It is the effective visualization of the results that will demonstrate the
value of social media data to top management.

Step 6: Consumption
While companies are quickly mastering sophisticated analytical methods, skills, and techniques needed
to convert big data into information, there seems to a gap between an organization’s capacity to produce
analytical results and its ability to effectively consuming it. Effective Consumption of analytics results
relies on human judgments to interpret valuable knowledge from the visual data. Meaningful
interpretation is of particular importance when we are dealing with descriptive analytics that leaves room
for different interpretations.

5. What are some main challenges to social media analytics?

1. Limited Control Over Content Topic & Delivery. Some portion of social media content, such as
product news, promotions, or brand imagery, is not fully under control of the social media manager.

2. Concurrently Running Campaigns & Initiatives. Oftentimes, there are a number of multiple campaigns
and initiatives running concurrently within any given property, and it can be difficult to separate their
results.

3. Existence Of Negative Actions. Due to the variety of interactions, negative results have a prominent
place in social media in the form of dislikes, un-follows, negative comments, etc. This complicates
measurement further.

4. Lack Of Evergreen Content & Environment For Testing. There is no such thing as static content in
social, which makes testing nearly impossible. (Pinned posts and tweets are about the closest it gets,
but the metrics only apply to profile/page views.)

5. Extremely Rapid Content Turnover. Research shows that the half-life of social posts lasts only around
3 hours, unless they are promoted. This again leaves little room to test and iterate on any given piece
of content.

6. No Support Of Cohort-Targeted Organic Actions & Results. Targeting or tracking results for groups of
known individuals is limited to paid media. This makes split testing impossible for organic content.
7. Uncontrolled Organic Content Serving. Facebook’s falling organic reach has been causing a
stir recently. It serves as an example of marketers’ lack of control over if and how organic content is
served on social media.

8. Frequent Feature Updates & Changes. Typical of new media, social

networks make frequent updates to features and functionality, affecting “what works” and in some
cases making learnings obsolete.

9. Inability To Track Impact Of Engagement. Organic posts can be tracked only for click-through events:
engagement actions cannot be traced directly to an off-site activity.

10. Cross-Effects Between Different Engagement Actions. Shares impact reach which in turns impacts
likes and comments, but likes and comments can also increase the feed ranking of the post,
increasing opportunity for exposure. This jumble of different actions influencing one another makes it
difficult to separate their individual impact.

11. Difficulty Of Quantifying Value Per Engagement. Due to the above reasons, it is oftentimes
impossible to even estimate how much a share or retweet is actually worth to the business.

12.Unstructured data is challenging While unstructured data tends to muck-up any kind of analysis, it’s
especially challenging in the context of real-time analytics, because you want interpretation IN REAL
TIME. Handling text in real time often means using computer-generated translations of the written word.