Introduction
Social media is everywhere in our lives now. From our entertainment to our personal and professional lives, it is involved in nearly every aspect of human life. This makes sense since humans are social creatures and social media makes communication with other people faster and easier. This is also true for business. Data has transformed the world of business, allowing for concrete insights into a various number of things regarding customers, revenue, costs, etc. So, it would make sense to combine the two. Well, that already exists and it is helping businesses in tremendous ways. In an article by Paul Nnakwe titled “Why You Must Use Social Media Analytics” he lists these benefits in depth (the article can be found here).
Summary of Article
The article starts out by giving some background on the topic and then giving some things that social media analytics can be used to answer. After the article goes into the value of social media data, and what makes a post valuable on social media (virality and quality of the content). The article then elaborates on the nature of social media data. Social media data has 4 key aspects to it: It has high velocity (information travels very fast on social media), it is highly diverse (different forms of content on social media – articles, videos, just audio, pictures, etc.), it has different types of structure (semi-structured and unstructured), it is not analytical friendly (unclean data).
My Take
I enjoyed reading this article because it was informative and concise. I appreciated how the author organized the key aspects of social media data. I also really liked how the author gave a list of questions that social media data can help us answer. I liked this because it shows you what the rest of the article can be used for and why he is talking about this in the first place. One thing I didn’t like about this article was that there were no solutions to the problems presented. For example, the author informed us on how data from social media can be unstructured and also told us how that can lead to problems in analysis (or at least more work) but never showed us how to fix it. But the author hinted in the next article that will be there in his conclusion so we will know sooner or later.
Conclusion
All in all, I liked this article. It was an interesting read and it showed me how social media analytics can be used in business to help them. It was also organized and formatted in a nice and easy-to-read way which really helped with my understanding and overall experience with this article. I recommend you take a look at it (the article can be found here).