دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی تحلیل رسانه های اجتماعی - یافتن موضوع، جمع آوری و آماده سازی اطلاعات - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

Since an ever-increasing part of the population makes use of social media in their day-to-day lives, social media data is being analysed in many different disciplines. The social media analytics process involves four distinct steps, data discovery, collection, preparation, and analysis. While there is a great deal of literature on the challenges and difficulties involving specific data analysis methods, there hardly exists research on the stages of data discovery, collection, and preparation. To address this gap, we conducted an extended and structured literature analysis through which we identified challenges addressed and solutions proposed. The literature search revealed that the volume of data was most often cited as a challenge by researchers. In contrast, other categories have received less attention. Based on the results of the literature search, we discuss the most important challenges for researchers and present potential solutions. The findings are used to extend an existing framework on social media analytics. The article provides benefits for researchers and practitioners who wish to collect and analyse social media data.

Conclusion

Social media analytics is still a relatively new research area, but it is of great interest to the Information Systems community and many researchers are embarking on SMA projects in our field. This article contributes to the Information Systems literature by presenting a summary of the main challenges and difficulties researchers face in the steps of the social media analytics research process that come before the data is analysed: discovery, collection and preparation. As a second contribution to the literature, we also point researchers to possible solutions for these challenges. These findings are equally relevant to practitioners, as businesses are increasingly looking to extract meaningful information from social media data, and are facing many of the same challenges researchers do. Conceptualising the problem using the three-step social media analytics framework by Stieglitz et al. (2014) and the four “big data” V’s provides a framework in which to think about possible difficulties before they arise. Which volume of data do we expect? How do we discover the parts which are relevant to our research? Do we have adequate infrastructure to cope with that volume when collecting and preparing the data? Which format will the data be in? If the data is unstructured, how can we extract the relevant structured information from it? This article is meant to help researchers ask and find answers to questions such as these. If the challenges highlighted above are addressed successfully, the social media analytics project will be much more likely to be a success.