Sample Research Topic: Social Media Analytics

With the prevalent usage of social media in the form of text, audio, video, news, comments, reviews etc. there is a burgeoning demand to understand what’s the latest trend, overall customer perception regarding product, customer service quality etc. Forms of social media data like text, audio, video and so on are example of unstructured data not compatible with traditional structured database like MS SQL etc. Moreover the amount of data generated in social media is humongous and can be tagged as one example of big data.

Using unstructured and non-relational databases in big data environment, social media data can be analyzed to determine hot issues, customer perception, market trends etc. Search analysis is one way to know how many people are looking forward to an upcoming product or product upgrade like a launch of smartphone etc. Google analytics is a great example of search portal.

Opinion analysis is another way of analytics where text based feedbacks, comments and reviews are analyzed, trended and forecasted to determine for instance, if customer like the particular product or not. Akter and Aziz (2016) detailed opinion mining of a Facebook group to determine trends like food or restaurant popularity etc. using lexicon based dictionary approach. Similar analysis can be performed to determine the popularity of a certain product; for instance Nike’s sales forecasting was performed using social data based upon likes, searches, trends, reviews etc. (Winder et al., 2016).

Advance social media analytical techniques will help management making key decisions like product launch, garnering feedback, providing customer support, improving perception etc. in an efficient fashion with high degree of confidence. Business intelligence extracted using advance statistical techniques will ensure small variance and high order of confidence.