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Learning Social Media Analytics with R
Learning Social Media Analytics with R

Learning Social Media Analytics with R: Transform data from social media platforms into actionable business insights

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Profile Icon Karthik Ganapathy Profile Icon Sarkar Profile Icon Sharma Profile Icon Raghav Bali
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Paperback May 2017 394 pages 1st Edition
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Arrow left icon
Profile Icon Karthik Ganapathy Profile Icon Sarkar Profile Icon Sharma Profile Icon Raghav Bali
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$54.99
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5 (4 Ratings)
Paperback May 2017 394 pages 1st Edition
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Learning Social Media Analytics with R

Chapter 2. Twitter – What's Happening with 140 Characters

An article in Forbes in 2012 outlined research undertaken by a Paris-based analytics firm. The research had found Jakarta to be the world's most active Twitter city (source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2012/12/30/the-worlds-most-active-twitter-city-you-wont-guess-it/#3b3f7d16343b). This may be a surprise, given the population count and other dynamics of the city, but such insights aren't jaw-dropping any more. The world is now a place where every other person has a virtual identity on numerous social networking platforms. The previous chapter gave you a quick glimpse into what a social network is (in case you didn't already know it) and this chapter will build on those concepts and set the tone for the rest of the book.

Twitter, as we all know, is a chirpy social network that's meant for sharing information at break-neck speeds. Technically, it is a microblogging platform which...

Understanding Twitter

Understanding Twitter

Twitter's initial design. Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jackdorsey/182613360/

Born in 2006, Twitter is a social networking cum online news service which enables its users to share content in bursts of 140 characters. Over the years, it has evolved like any other successful thing on the Internet and added and/or removed features. Our aim in this chapter is to understand different aspects of this service and use them to draw different insights or solve business problems.

Tip

Twitter was the brainchild of Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. It started as the SMS of the Internet with very simple ideas. You can read the interesting story of its inception here: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/twitter-creator.html

As discussed in the previous chapter, social networks are far reaching and dynamic. Twitter allows users to share information using text, images, videos, GIFs, links, hash tags, handles and so on from a variety...

Revisiting analytics workflow

As discussed in detail in Chapter 1, Getting Started with R and Social Media Analytics (see A typical social media analytics workflow), we defined some key steps involved in the analysis of data from different social networks. Continuing with the same theme for Twitter, the different use cases we will work on in the next sections can also be broken down into the following key steps:

  • Data access
  • Data processing and normalization
  • Data analysis
  • Insights

The data access step involves understanding the APIs and their corresponding R packages to tap into the social network. We've already talked about creating a Twitter app and did a quick connect and extraction of tweets using R. Each of the following sections will make use of the same initial step for data access and then build upon them based on the requirements. We will discuss and provide details for each of the other steps in this workflow as we progress with the use cases. Stay tuned.

Trend analysis

Twitter is a speedy medium. Information (along with rumors and nonsense) travels at breakneck speeds across the social network/world. It has now become a norm for an event or news to break first on Twitter and then on any other source of information. It is commonly observed that TV news channels usually play catchup with Twitter during any news breaks. Such a quick spread of information has its own pros and cons, but a discussion of these are out of the scope of this book.

It would be safe to say that if there's anything trending in the connected world, it will be on Twitter first. From brand promotions, sports events, government decisions, election results to news about terror attacks, natural disasters and the notorious fake celebrity death news, Twitter has it all.

Twitter uses search terms, what are called hashtags in Twitter-verse. Any word which begins with a # is termed as a hashtag and instantly becomes searchable on the platform. This not only helps users search...

Sentiment analysis

Twitter timelines are the new battlegrounds for brands, fans and organizations to fight it out and present a winner. Twitter is also a place where users usually rant about their disappointments or share their happiness. The dynamics of human interaction and our urge to share opinionated views on wide ranging topics, from cat pictures to wars and everything in between, have reached an altogether different level.

With its 300 million plus users and counting, Twitter is a virtual country in itself! Its huge user base which generates tweets (or opinions) by the count of millions every minute present a unique opportunity to study and utilize human sentiment and/or opinions. This study of our sentiments and emotion carries a lot more value than just pure academic research (which is, of course, still required by any standards). It carries a lot of business value for companies, governments and celebrities alike.

Before we dive into implementation details and a particular use case...

Follower graph analysis

So far, we have analyzed Twitter and tweets to uncover some interesting insights using techniques and concepts of trend analysis and sentiment analysis. We've utilized different attributes of tweets, like creation time, location and even the text itself, to answer certain questions. In this section, we will touch upon Twitter's network aspects. #BraceYourSelves

A social network is a network or a graph at its core. In formal words, a social network is generally a graph representing its users as nodes (or vertices) linked to each other based on certain relationships called edges. Each social network has its own definition of these relationships. For this section, we will focus on Twitter's relationships and network in general.

In Twitter-verse as we all know, there are no friends! A friend relationship is usually a bidirectional relationship, that is, if A is a friend of B, then it is safe to say that B is also a friend of A (well, usually; see Facebook...

Summary

A tweet is far more than just 140 characters, and Twitter offers quite a lot to play with for a social network. We covered a lot of ground in this chapter by looking at many concepts and solving use cases based on real Twitter data. We learned about different Twitter objects and its APIs. We created an app of our own and utilized R's twitteR package to connect and tap into its APIs. We performed trend analysis to understand how a hashtag is used by tweeple and its temporal affects. We also solved a use case involving sentiment analysis. Through this use case, we first understood the key concepts related to sentiment analysis and then employed them to understand what emotions @POTUS conveys through his tweets. We also performed hierarchical clustering of tweets to visualize common themes using a dendrogram. The final use case analyzed Twitter from a network/graph analysis stand point. We utilized R's different libraries to prepare a network map of followers and perform...

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Key benefits

  • A practical guide written to help leverage the power of the R eco-system to extract, process, analyze, visualize and model social media data
  • Learn about data access, retrieval, cleaning, and curation methods for data originating from various social media platforms.
  • Visualize and analyze data from social media platforms to understand and model complex relationships using various concepts and techniques such as Sentiment Analysis, Topic Modeling, Text Summarization, Recommendation Systems, Social Network Analysis, Classification, and Clustering.

Description

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.

Who is this book for?

It is targeted at IT professionals, Data Scientists, Analysts, Developers, Machine Learning Enthusiasts, social media marketers and anyone with a keen interest in data, analytics, and generating insights from social data. Some background experience in R would be helpful, but not necessary, since this book is written keeping in mind, that readers can have varying levels of expertise.

What you will learn

  • Learn how to tap into data from diverse social media platforms using the R ecosystem
  • Use social media data to formulate and solve real-world problems
  • Analyze user social networks and communities using concepts from graph theory and network analysis
  • Learn to detect opinion and sentiment, extract themes, topics, and trends from unstructured noisy text data from diverse social media channels
  • Understand the art of representing actionable insights with effective visualizations
  • Analyze data from major social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Github, StackExchange, and so on
  • Learn to leverage popular R packages such as ggplot2, topicmodels, caret, e1071, tm, wordcloud, twittR, Rfacebook, dplyr, reshape2, and many more
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Table of Contents

9 Chapters
1. Getting Started with R and Social Media Analytics Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Twitter – What's Happening with 140 Characters Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Analyzing Social Networks and Brand Engagements with Facebook Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Foursquare – Are You Checked in Yet? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Analyzing Software Collaboration Trends I – Social Coding with GitHub Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Analyzing Software Collaboration Trends II - Answering Your Questions with StackExchange Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Believe What You See – Flickr Data Analysis Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. News – The Collective Social Media! Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
(4 Ratings)
5 star 100%
4 star 0%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%
Amazon Customer Jun 11, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
One of the few books covering detailed use-cases and analytics on over 5-6 major social media platforms. I have read several books and blogs on social media mining but the current offerings had been lacking based on either content or problems showcased. This one definitely has a lot of examples and code which helps you get started with hands-on analysis yourself. Only con would be I wish there was an equivalent of this book in Python
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Swati Jul 28, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Well structured content with variety of examples and visualizations. Still going through the chapters. Best part: analysis for social networks is not available in other books/blogs eg stack exchange n foursquare
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Dhiraj Baurisetty Jul 19, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Really good book with a very deep insight into R.... Love to recommend it
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Amazon Customer Jun 11, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This is a good read which covers mining info from multiple social media websites and apps. Really liked the coverage from normal analysis and visualizations to advanced methods like text mining and recommendations. Overall a great book if you are into R and want to analyze data from social websites.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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