Social media measurement

Social media measurement, 'social media monitoring' or social listening is a way of computing popularity of a brand or company by extracting information from social media channels, such as blogs, wikis, news sites, micro-blogs such as Twitter, social networking sites, video/photo sharing websites, forums, message boards and user-generated content from time to time. In other words, this is the way to caliber success of social media marketing strategies used by a company or a brand. It is also used by companies to gauge current trends in the industry. The process first gathers data from different websites and then performs analysis based on different metrics like time spent on the page, click through rate, content share, comments, text analytics to identify positive or negative emotions about the brand. Social media measurement, 'social media monitoring' or social listening is a way of computing popularity of a brand or company by extracting information from social media channels, such as blogs, wikis, news sites, micro-blogs such as Twitter, social networking sites, video/photo sharing websites, forums, message boards and user-generated content from time to time. In other words, this is the way to caliber success of social media marketing strategies used by a company or a brand. It is also used by companies to gauge current trends in the industry. The process first gathers data from different websites and then performs analysis based on different metrics like time spent on the page, click through rate, content share, comments, text analytics to identify positive or negative emotions about the brand. Social Media Measurement process starts with defining a goal that needs to be achieved and defining expected outcome of the process. The expected outcome varies per the goal and is usually measured by variety of metrics. This is followed by defining possible social strategies to be used to achieve the goal. Then the next step is designing strategies to be used and setting up configuration tools which eases the process of collecting the data. In next step, strategies and tools are deployed in real time. This step involves conducting Quality Assurance tests of the methods deployed to collect the data. And in final step, data collected from the system is analyzed and if need arises, is refined on the run time to enhance the methodologies used. The last step ensures that the result obtained is more aligned with the goal defined in the first step. Acquiring data from social media is in demand of an exploring the user participation and population with the purpose of retrieving and collecting so many kinds of data(ex: comments, downloads etc.). There are several prevalent techniques to acquire data such as Network traffic analysis, Ad-hoc application and Crawling Network Traffic Analysis- Network traffic analysis is the process of capturing network traffic and observing it closely to determine what is happening in the network. It is primarily done to improve the performance, security and other general management of the network. However concerned about the potential tort of privacy on the Internet, network traffic analysis is always restricted by the government. Furthermore, high speed links are not adaptable to traffic analysis because the possible overload problem according to the packet sniffing mechanism Ad-hoc Application- Ad-hoc application is a kind of application that provide services and games to social network users by developing the APIs offered by social network company(Facebook Developer Platform). The infrastructure of Ad-hoc application allow the user to interact with the interface layer instead of the application servers. The API provide path for application to access information after the user login. Moreover, the size of the data set collected vary with the popularity of the social media platform i.e. social media platforms having high number of users will have more data than platforms having less user base. Scraping is a process in which the APIs collect online data from the social media. The data collected from Scraping is in raw format. However, having access to these type data is a bit difficult because of its commercial value. Crawling- Crawling is a process in which a web crawler creates indexes of all the words in a web-page, stores them, then follows all the hyperlinks and indexes on that page and again stores them. It is the most popular technique for data acquisition and is also well known for its easy operation based on prevalent Object-Orientated Programming Language (Java or Python etc.). And most important, social network companies (YouTube, Flicker, Facebook, Instagram and etc.) are friendly to crawling technique by providing public APIs Monitoring social media allows researchers to find insights into a brand's overall visibility on social media, to measure the impact of campaigns, to identify opportunities for engagement, to assess competitor activity and share of voice, and to detect impending crises. It can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, brands or products. This is the work of a cross-section of groups that include market researchers, PR staff, marketing teams, social-engagement and community staff, agencies and sales teams. Several different providers have developed tools to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social-media channels - from blogging to internet video to internet forums. This allows companies to track what consumers say about their brands and actions. Companies can then react to these conversations and interact with consumers through social-media platforms. Apart from commercial applications, social-media monitoring has become a pervasive technique applied by public organizations and governments. Monitoring is a tradition within the public sector, and social-media monitoring provides a real-time approach to detecting and responding to social developments.Governments have come to realize the need for strategies to cope with surprises from the rapid expansion of public issues. Sobkowicz introduced a framework with three blocks of social-media opinion tracking, simulating and forecasting. It includes: Bekkers introduced the application of social-media monitoring in the Netherlands. Public organizations in the Netherlands (such as the Tax Agency and the Education Ministry) have started to use social-media monitoring to obtain better insights into the sentiments of target groups. On the one hand, the public sector will be enabled to provide timely and efficient answers to the public by using social-media monitoring techniques, but on the other hand, they also have to deal with concerns about ethical issues such as transparency and privacy.