Social media is a rich source of big data. Knowing the most effective ways to mine social media data can help firms acquire information and derive insightful business results. Social media is unstructured and dynamic, thus requiring new analytical tools and techniques for analysis. This course aims to provide hands-on experience for students to use various tools and techniques specifically geared to social media to understand customers’ trends, and make predictions that can improve sales growth. Practical business cases in user segmentation, customer review analysis, community structure mining, influencer detection, etc., will be discussed. Python and the state-of-the-art machine learning packages will be used as the primary tools.

CILO-1: To explain clearly fundamental principles of social network analysis and text mining. CILO-2: To recognize popular methods and algorithms of social network analysis and text mining. CILO-3: To apply appropriate methods and algorithms to solve given problems. CILO-4: To communicate effectively about social network analytics solutions.