In the article, “Social Media: Defining, Developing, and Divining”, the authors Caleb T. Carr and Rebecca A. Hayes from Illinois State University, define Social Media as “Internet-based, disentrained, and persistent channels of masspersonal communication facilitating perceptions of interactions among users, deriving value primarily from user-generated content.” With Social Media rapidly increasing as a part our daily news, entertainment and self-expression, companies are constantly trying to keep up with the newest ways to keep their consumers engaged. This is where Social Media Scraping and Network Analysis allows businesses to improve. Scraping is collecting online data from social media and other Web sites in the form of unstructured text and also known as site scraping, web harvesting and web data extraction. Social Media Network Analysis is useful when studying multiple types of social influences and is useful for analyzing the spreading of information and the formation of opinions and beliefs.
In the article, “Identifying the new Influencers in the Internet Era: Social Media and Social Network Analysis”, written by, Miguel del Fresno García, Alan J. Daly y Sagrario Segado Sánchez-Cabezudo, they say that Social Media Network Anaylsis (SNA) has four characteristics of importance in this study:
“It adopts a structural intuition of social relations; it gathers and analyzes relational data systematically; it draws on mathematical models that are foundational to the analysis and utilizes technology and, it creates and shares visualizations of relationships and interaction patterns, which allow the generation of significant structural insights and their communication to others.”
