2014年9月21日星期日

A glimpse at the Application of Social Media Analysis

After getting enrolled into the course of Social Media Analysis (SMA), the first question I want to clarify by myself is why analyzing the social media network.

According to the illustration from WIKIPEDIA, A social networking service is a platform to build social networks or social relations among people who share interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections. The social network platform has blossomed everywhere since the emergence of internet. According to the statistic report revealed by tech.qq.com on July 25th, 2014, the total subscribers on Facebook reached up to as high as 2.2 billion, which represents nearly 30% of the global population. Tons of conversations, comments and replies that within them could actually implicate a great value for the business market given all these contents are processed properly.


Figure 1 Various Social Media Network

With the further question of how can SMA help the social media network platform, I did a little research on the internet and found a business instance as the application of SMA. In this business scenario, MyMadrid is an mobile APP providing a unique interface to the online and mobile fan community of the top football club Real Madrid C.F. A SMA & SNA (Social Network Analysis) company was hired to help MyMadrid for an in-depth statistical view on its user behavior. Eventually the following information was output via the analyzing techniques.
-          Who is talking to whom?
-          What do they say?
-     The top influencers surrounding the social object “MyMadrid”. The top 4         influencers can be seen as the brand’s ambassadors as the total network of these 4 people has an immediate reach of 5420 twitter accounts.

Apparently, with the above statistic information, the APP can understand its user much better in many dimensions. Maybe different marketing campaigns could be deployed based on this deeper understanding in order to attract more users hereafter.

Thus, from my point of view, social network analysis provides the applicable approach enabling us to leverage all these contents and extract the valuables from social network. In the lecture 2&3, Professor Chan has explained various useful methods & principals to do the analysis. And I believe this course will lead us into a fantastic journey of the SMA world.

Reference
[1] WIKIPEDIA, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network
[2] SNA focus to MyMadrid - Real Madrid official Mobile Community for its Fans, www.social-3.com

1 条评论:

  1. Hi Lin! Glad to read your first blog and become the first one to share ideas with you. You mentioned many companies now view on user behavior and want to extract the valuables from social network, which is more like the concept of big data. And now more and more data markets grown up and I think it will be a trend that earning money from billions of thousands of user's data. Let's study together to find more useful analysis methods!

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