Social Media Data Mining: Insights and Strategies

Social Media Data Mining

Insights and Strategies

Social Media Data Mining Insights and Strategies

Vidhur Gupta

Social Media Data Mining

Insights and Strategies

Vidhur Gupta

ISBN - 9789361522994

COPYRIGHT © 2025 by Educohack Press. All rights reserved.

This work is protected by copyright, and all rights are reserved by the Publisher. This includes, but is not limited to, the rights to translate, reprint, reproduce, broadcast, electronically store or retrieve, and adapt the work using any methodology, whether currently known or developed in the future.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, or similar designations in this publication does not imply that such terms are exempt from applicable protective laws and regulations or that they are available for unrestricted use.

The Publisher, authors, and editors have taken great care to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information presented in this publication at the time of its release. However, no explicit or implied guarantees are provided regarding the accuracy, completeness, or suitability of the content for any particular purpose.

If you identify any errors or omissions, please notify us promptly at "educohackpress@gmail.com & sales@educohackpress.com" We deeply value your feedback and will take appropriate corrective actions.

The Publisher remains neutral concerning jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Published by Educohack Press, House No. 537, Delhi- 110042, INDIA

Email: educohackpress@gmail.com & sales@educohackpress.com

Cover design by Team EDUCOHACK

Preface

Social media is one of the biggest media platforms these days. Many changes are evolving in this media day by day. This platform can bring a massive change to this world. This is not only an entertainment stream; many startups, business expansions are making a mark using social media. As time goes by, social media users and influencers are growing in large numbers. This is an era where social media is a huge networking platform.

Having a wide area of resources, it’s a bit difficult to estimate our target audience. Here, where social media mining takes its place. This alloy of data mining and social media makes the world faster and brighter. Data Mining is a procedure of extracting information from various sources of data and making insights. It makes the users categorize the data and influencers to analyze the data. This book also explains the upcoming challenges and how to deal with them. The book concentrates on different methods to achieve the perfect results. It also describes the mining procedures in a particular media platform, which fetches the outcomes easily.

We researchers of Computer Science and Engineering have a keen understanding of these topics to make our readers understand concepts effectively and have a total experience of implementation in the real world. The research is mainly focused on the advantages of social media and its usage in critical situations. The research involves data mining, machine learning, artificial intelligence to deal with social media and its applications.

Content

01. Introduction

1.1 Definition 1

1.2 Overview of the Book 2

1.3 Various Social Media Platforms 3

1.4 Upcoming Challenges 5

1.5 Summary 6

1.6 Exercise 7

02. Prerequisites

2.1 Graph Fundamentals 9

2.3 Network Models 29

2.4 Attachment Models 37

2.5 Random Graphs 38

2.6 Network Evaluation 41

2.7 Summary 49

2.8 Exercise 50

03. Data Mining

3.1 Data Mining Algorithms 55

3.2 Data Mining Techniques 63

3.3 Data Mining Implementation 65

3.4 Data Mining Tools 67

3.5 Summary 68

3.6 Exercise 69

04. Social Media Interactions

4.1 Interaction Strategies 72

4.2 Engage Your Followers Today 73

4.3 Social Media Engagement 75

4.4 Behavior Analytics 77

4.5 Summary 88

4.6 Exercise 88

05. Mining Facebook

5.1 Overview 91

5.2 Social graph API 91

5.3 What are Different APIs Offered by

5.4 Why is the Facebook API important? 94

5.5 Social Graph Connection 97

5.6 Remarks 109

5.7 Exercise 109

06. Mining Twitter

6.1 Overview 112

6.2 Retrieving trends 118

6.3 Computing the intersection of two sets

6.4 Computing the Lexical Diversity of Tweets 122

6.5 Collecting Time-Series Data 127

6.6 Closing Remarks 129

6.7 Exercise 129

07. Mining Linkedin

7.1 Overview 132

7.2 Exploring the LinkedIn API 132

7.3 Clustering Data of LinkedIn 136

7.4 Closing Remarks 144

7.5 Exercise 145

08. Mining Webpages

8.1 Overview 148

8.2 Web Structure Mining 148

8.3 Web Crawlers 150

8.4 Web Content Mining 151

8.5 Web Content Mining Methods 152

8.6 Web Content Mining Techniques 154

8.7 Quality of Analytics for Processing Human

8.8 Closing Remarks 157

8.9 Exercise 157

09. Mining Mails

9.1 Overview 160

9.2 Obtaining and Processing a Mail Corpus 160

9.3 Converting a toy mailbox to JSON 162

9.4 Converting the Enron corpus to a standardized inbox format 164

9.5 Converting a mbox to a JSON structure suitable for import

into MongoDB 165

9.6 The Mongo DB 170

9.7Analyzing the Enron Corpus 172

9.8 Analyzing Your Own Mail Data 179

9.9 Remarks 182

9.10 Exercise 183

Case Study 184

Glossary 187

Index206

Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1 Definition

From letters, telephones, newspapers to posts, likes, comments, today the world is traveling with fuel named ‘social media.’ Not so recent, social media inventions have been coming into the limelight since the 1970s. DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform), Talkomatic, Term-Talk, PLATO Notes, BBS (Bulletin Board System), Fidonet, Classmates, SixDegrees.com, Yahoo messenger were four fathers of social media. This media doesn’t have any restrictions. All age groups can use it; all categories of people can understand it. In simple words, we can say, social media has changed citizens into netizens. Tonnes of posts, thousands of feedback are making the world of social media drown with data.

Social media can be categorized into six ways, social networking, bookmarking, social news, media sharing, micro blogging, and online forum sites. One can communicate, collaborate, share reviews and opinions, market their brand, entertain, and improve knowledge through social media. But as the saying goes, Too many cooks spoil the broth, too much information may mislead our direction of achieving our goal. That’s the reason; social media mining is important in making social media knowledgeable stuff.

Fig 1.1- Social Media Mining

1.2 Overview of the Book

The book consists of 10 chapters, where each chapter has many subsections to explain the chapter precisely. Every chapter has a summary to take an overlook on chapter quickly. People preparing for exams can revise through these summarizations. At the end of every chapter, there are exercises, which help in memorizing topics. The deep understanding of the chapter I go on

In chapter I, we are going to learn,

•What is social media mining?

•What are the problems faced in this field, and how to trigger them?

•Different social media platforms and their applications

The flow continues to chapter II, the different techniques to a target audience in different platforms. This gives a deep understanding of

•Algorithms to be used

•Identify communities in a social network

•Build a strong network among the individuals.

Till now, we have been focused on social media and algorithms. From chapter 3, we are going to learn about data mining and,

•Models of data mining

•Techniques and applications of data mining

•Tools used

In Chapter IV, we will learn about

•Interactions about social media

•Behavior analytics

Fig. 1.2 Social Media mining

1.3 Various Social Media Platforms

They are many media platforms, which have unique features in each application to make the audience engage and entertain. We are going to discuss some patterns to mine in some platforms in later chapters. Here we are going to discuss some categories of social media platforms.

1.3.1 Blogs:

A regularly updated website or web page, typically one runs by an individual small group, which is written in an informal or conversational style. Writers write a post on a specific topic that is published on the blog. This era began in 1994. People share their personal information, which we call personal blogs. The professional blogs have information related to subjects, knowledge, technical updates, daily news updates, etc. Blogging also has business advantages. One can share their project ideas, work accomplishments, future plans. It can also be used for freelancing to earn money and rank their page on google. One of the advantages of blogging is, it boosts traffic which is helpful in lead generation.

Examples of Blogs are WordPress, Blogger, and LiveJournal

1.3.2 Social News:

There are many newspapers in network media. They are many categories of newspapers, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. They were in paper and book formats. Now, with the help of technology, they are changed to digitized format. We can easily access through any part of newspaper, sports section, entertainment column, politics, searching jobs. The best advantage of it, while we are researching a topic, we can save time by clicking rather than searching in newspapers.

Examples of Social news are Digg, Slashdot.

1.3.3 Photo and video sharing:

These platforms are used to share videos and pictures with friends and colleagues. There are group chats where all people can see one share in chat. For example, I saw an informative video on a site; the share option will be readily available beside the video. With one click, I can send it to my friends who are eager to learn something new. With the emergence of social networks, image sharing has now become a common online activity. For example, in Great Britain, 70% of online users engaged in image sharing in 2013; 64% of British users shared their photos through a social network. Facebook stated in 2015 that there were approximately two billion images uploaded to its service daily.

Examples of photo and video sharing platforms are Flickr, YouTube

1.3.4 Opinion mining:

The second advantage of social media is feedback sharing. Any business would be moving forward with the help of feedback. No surprise, social media is a useful space for this. Views and opinions on social media, or in product reviews, surveys, and beyond, providing a wealth of information about your customer’s thoughts and feelings, make the business dwell in profits.

Examples of opinion mining are Epinions, Yelp.

1.3.5 Social Bookmarking:

Social bookmarking is the process of tagging a website page with a browser-based tool so that you can easily visit it again later. Instead of saving social media posts to your browser bookmarks, you can use different platforms’ features to bookmark posts. These sites are useful for knowledge sharing and social media inspiration, earning backlinks, and networking with potential influencers. With social bookmarking, companies and social media marketing managers save valuable content to add to their publishing schedule. We can find relevant that helps to build authority on a blog.

Examples of Social bookmarking sites are Delicious, StumbleUpon.

1.3.6 Microblogs:

Micro blogging is an online broadcast medium that exists as a specific form of blogging. A micro-blog differs from a traditional blog because its content is typically smaller in both actual and aggregated file size. The first blog was tumbleblogs. The first post was published in April 2005. This is a powerful weapon for mid-sized and large companies. These are used to share content and update news. Peer-to-peer communication is well handed by micro blogs. Organizations set up private social networks exclusively for their employees to share project updates, photos, links, and personal/casual information.

Examples of micro blogs are Twitter, GoogleBuzz

1.3.7 Social Networking Platform:

The sites are virtual communities where users can communicate, interact with real-life friends, strangers, families, colleagues. They can incorporate a range of new information and communication tools, operating on desktops and laptops, on mobile devices such as tablet computers and smartphones. A rise in social network use is being driven by college students using the services to network with professionals for internship and job opportunities.

Examples of Social Networking Platforms are Facebook, Orkut, Linked In, and Instagram.

1.4 Upcoming Challenges

There are two sides to the coin, the positive side and the negative side. The data in social media is vast, difficult to judge what to consume and what not to consume. The negative side also called, ‘The dark side of social media", has many disadvantages. The news can be faked easily by masking the true evidence. False information can be spread widely, leading to misunderstanding. These misunderstandings will result in taking away the person’s life even. Some of the challenges faced in mining are

1.4.1 Volume:

The storage space required. Social media is a big source; exploring through all these data, it’s a toilsome work to find one particular thing. We need to have patience and underground research to find something suitable to match our work. Although this is a platform to provide recommendations and suggestions, that one specific would lie at the bottom of the line. For example, I am searching for relevant information; I need to go to all sites to collect it. In this process, I will remain with abundant data which sums up my original information.

1.4.2 Velocity:

The speed of data creation coupled with the advantage gained from analyzing the data in real-time. The problem arises when social media is explicitly used for entertainment purposes rather than acknowledging the importance of data. The users are doubled and tripled; the data is blowing faster than air. As a result, the time and space for analyzing information are becoming less. Getting insights from the information is a tough job, as there are many inputs gathering

1.4.3 Variety:

The fact that data takes many different forms. It is often unstructured, or its structure is specific to