Exploring Big Data with Social Media Analytics

Today, over 5 billion people have mobile phones, 2 billion people are on the Internet, an individual spends more than 3 hours online, and over 400 million tweets are sent per day. 2.5 billion contents are shared on Facebook, 2.7 billion “Likes”; 300 million photos are being uploaded. Facebook is the world´s largest community serving over a billion of users. Social media are storing massive amount of data of terabytes to zettabytes size, never-before-analyzed data that carry crucial information, which cannot be ignored. However, around 90% of the captured data is “Unstructured” meaning it's spontaneously generated and not easily captured and classified. The graph below shows the voluminous increase of unstructured data from 2010 to 2015.

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Characteristics of Big Data in Social Media:

The characteristics of this unstructured data are high in volume, high velocity, or high variety and complexity. Big data comes from sensors, devices, video/audio, networks, log files, transactional applications, web, and social media - much of it generated in real time and in a very large scale.

Reasons to Explore Big Data with Social Media Analytics

1. Social Media Analytics and Volume. Social Media contribute huge volume of data. There is a high rate of unstructured data streaming and increase of sensor and machine-to-machine data being collected. Correct use of Social Media Analytics could help create significant meaning with the relevant data.

2. Social Media Analytics and Velocity. Data from Social Media is streaming at exceptional speed that must be dealt properly and many organizations face a great challenge with this high velocity data.

3. Social Media Analytics and Variety. Data in Social Media come in all types of formats. Struc...

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IBM has a tool “Social Media Analytics” for discovering customer needs and sentiments, to gain better understanding of the market. It also helps understand new market trends and patterns, which is advantageous to the product development team of a firm. The tool also helps in targeting prospective customers by:

• Collect: Capturing Consumers data from social media to understand attitudes, opinions and trends and what type of product is the customer actually looking for?

• Process: Predicts Customer behavior and aims at improving customer satisfaction by anticipating customer needs and recommending the next best actions.

• Improve: Creates customized advertisements, campaigns and promotions that increase the number of social media participants.

• It also identifies the primary influencers within a specific social network and targets them with unique offers.( Ref 7)