All businesses feel the need to be visible online, more so they are concerned about visibility on online social media. Thus is it has become crucial how businesses utilize social media, and the diverse and huge volume of data it provides, in ways so as to divert and increase users towards their own products and services and building brand identity and loyalty.
Mining social media data has thus become a crucial research tool which is handling and converting huge amount data into comprehensible and configurable guide that can be used to predict patterns and arrive at solutions to a lot of problems. Data mining researchers are helping businesses develop intelligent and effective business plans by extracting and processing volumes of data such as blogs, photos, comments, videos and geo tags to understand user behavior and preferences.
A lot of social media platforms are available to people world over which can be used to share, connect and make sense of the world around us. Millions of users are sharing information through sites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Linkedin, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, Youtube, Blog Sites, and Wikis etc to reach out to others around the world. Vast amount of content if being generated on social media sites every hour and this is only likely to grow since the access to internet and mobile based technology is increasing. So it becomes imperative for individuals and organisations to take note of this massive data. Mining social media data should concentrate on not only how users are using and responding to products, services and technology but how they are responding to people, to organisations, and to significant events. Also what kinds of sources are they referring to, what influences their actions and what are they recommending to their networks and methods of their experiences can be improved.
While mining social media data, researchers are analyzing how information id being diffused, how news, gossips and viruses are being spread and opinions being created, influenced and changed. The practice is also giving rise to debates about user’s privacy, security and trust issues. Individuals and even organisations are being increasingly put under the risk of exposing themselves too much, which may make them vulnerable to attacks. Such as stalking, cyber-bullying, spamming and phishing scams. Nevertheless advantages of mining social media data are plenty, and are being utilized in designing business models, political campaign, brand networking and initiating viral marketing, trend analyses and prediction of sales. This has amplified the scope of social media mining community, tools and algorithms