3.2.1 Why is social media so popular?
With numbers this high, one must wonder why social media is so popular. Let’s break down three important aspects of the popularity of social media:
1) The technology behind social media.
Mobile phones may provide the biggest insight to this popularity. With decreased size and increased processing power and network speed, the ability to access and connect to people is almost constantly available [3].
2) Biological drives.
A very old aphorism by Aristotle is that “Man is by nature a social animal.” While, this assertion has its critics, and may be too general [4], it definitely plays a role in the explosion of social media. For many reasons, human beings have developed a larger neocortex than other primates and mammals of the same size [5], and this is the “social” part of our brain. The amazing advances in technology simply appeal to our existing nature in a very effective way.
3) Commercial incentives.
Part of the reason for the popularity of social media of course comes from the motivations of the corporations that run them. The top three social media sites are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn [6]. These sites work their best when you spend a large amount of time interacting with the platform they offer. In other words, they aren’t like a search engine or file sharing website, where the users get what they’re after and leave. Most social media sites operate by keeping users on their site. This is especially true for Twitter where less than 2% of even the most popular Tweets get a click, about the same as an advertisement [7]. As a result, sometimes social media platforms become especially good at keeping users engaged on content of their domain, but not expanding them into new ones. They are more like a platform for discussion, not a portal for discovery.
3.2.2 Analyzing information in this environment
With all of the interacting reasons for social media success and operation, it might be difficult to reasonably gather and interpret the data into usable information. This is where social media analytics comes in. In essence, social media analytics includes all the processing of this data to make informed business decisions, or interpret them for academic research [8].
The information from social media can be broken down into two categories. One category includes hard, measurable, structured data (think political party registration by state or county). The other includes emotions, descriptions, and unstructured data (think emotional reactions posted on Twitter in response to a political event). Once an organization or researcher has a goal in mind, they use key performance indicators (KPIs) to objectively evaluate their findings. One such example of structured data analysis would be counting the number of followers of a Twitter account, the number of retweets, and the number of mentions of a particular term or company name [8].