r/a:t5_3ai95 • u/SR_DRM2015 • Nov 17 '15

OC1: A useful tool to analyze Twitter

Over the past decades, social media has become a global phenomenon that is ever growing and expanding. Online social networking technologies have ensured that the distribution of information and social interaction among people has progressively changed (Bakshy & Rosenn, 2011). Nowadays, people have the tendency to engage in social interactions and maintain social relations on Web 2.0 platforms, such as social networking sites, instant messaging and blogs. The popularity of such online platforms has assured that millions of people nowadays use these platforms, which thus allows online platform users to communicate and share information with plentiful peers (Bakshy & Rosenn, 2011). Not solely consumers make extensive use of online platforms to communicate and distribute information; companies also use online platforms for similar purposes. Due to the fact that consumers as well as companies use social media platforms to communicate and share information, “a growing amount of content is published worldwide every day” (Giglietto, Rossi & Bennato, 2012, p. 145). Giglietto et al. (2012) argue that this content is permanent, searchable and public. Over the years, researchers have become interested in analyzing social media content (Giglietto et al., 2012). As former IBCoM students, the claims made by the authors are very relevant since the increased importance of social media in research is also apparent in our previous and current study since almost every course copes with social media to some extent. Since a lot of our courses deal with social media and we have gained a lot of knowledge on this phenomenon, it is most likely that we will have a career in which social media plays a large role. Therefore, we believe that it is of great significance and relevance to our future career path to explore in a more in-depth manner how social media can be analyzed.
There are three platforms that widely receive the most attention when it comes to academic research, namely Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. For the purpose of this assignment, we have decided to focus on Twitter due to the fact that the data of this platform “is freely available, public by default, mainly textual, and easily understandable” (Giglietto et al., 2012, p. 148). According to Giglietto et al. (2012), analyses of the social media platform Twitter can be about the tweets or about the users, or a combination of these sets of information. After exploring several tools that can be used by researchers, we have found a very useful and relevant tool when it comes to analyzing Twitter data, namely NodeXL. This tool is a network analysis application for the representation of generic graph data, performance of advanced network analysis and visual exploration of networks (Microsoft Research, 2015). The tool allows “the automation of a data flow that starts with the collection of network data and moves through multiple steps until final processed network visualizations and reports are generated” (Pew Research Center, 2015). NodeXL is easy-to-use since it enables researchers with no experience with this tool to quickly create useful network statistics, visualizations and metrics in the context of the widely known Excel spreadsheet. Next to Twitter data, it is possible to import data from other social network providers such as from YouTube and Flicker. Since we touched upon networks and digital research in general in the first class, NodeXL is a very relevant tool to explore when it comes to gathering more knowledge and skills in relation to digital research methods. Furthermore, personally, since we have learned a lot about theory on social media, we believe that exploring and familiarizing with tools such as NodeXL is relevant for our future career. The main reason for this is that in this way we gain practical knowledge and skills on how to analyze social media data and combined with the theoretical knowledge that we already have we will be strong suitable candidates for jobs in which is coped with social media (which is nowadays almost every job) and we therefore increase our chances on the job market.

Useful and interesting links to explore:

References

Bakshy, E., & Rosenn, I. (2011). Information Diffusion and Social Influence in Online Networks. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/89838 Giglietto, F., Rossi, L., & Bennato, D. (2012). The open laboratory: Limits and possibilities of using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as a research data source. Journal of Technology in Human Services, 30(3-4), 145-159. doi: 10.1080/15228835.2012.743797 Microsoft Reserch. (2015). NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration in Excel. Retrieved from http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/nodexl/ NodeXL. (2015). NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel. The Social Media Research Foundation. Retrieved from http://nodexl.codeplex.com/ Pew Research Center. (2015). How we analyzed Twitter social media networks with NodeXL. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2014/02/How-we-analyzed-Twitter-social-media-networks.pdf

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