Techniques for social media analysis

Machine learning is a basic tool to add intelligence and extract valuable insights from social media data. There exist other widespread concepts that are used for social media analysis: Text Analytics, Natural Language Processing, and Graph Mining.

The first notion allows to retrieve non trivial information from textual data, such as brands or people names, relationships between words, extraction of phone numbers, URLs, hashtags, and so on. Natural Language Processing is more extensive and aims at finding the meaning of the text by analyzing text structure, semantics, and concepts among others.

Social networks can also be represented by graph structures. The last mining technique enables the structural analysis of such networks. These methods help in discovering relationships, paths, connections and clusters of people, brands, topics, and so on, in social networks.

The applications of all the techniques will be presented in following chapters.