Data Mining

Social media, with its burgeoning user base, is generating unprecedented volumes of interactive data. This is a new kind of data, unlike that derived from other marketing channels either in the sheer quantity of 'social currency' or in the personal, expressive, and user-generated nature of much of the content. The task of data mining is to discover actionable insights in this virtual goldmine.

Social media data mining offers several advantages. First, the data set is enormous and still growing. Second, the data is naturally occurring—people are saying and doing things online all the time in very natural ways.

Third, much of the data is text-based, which is fundamentally different from the traditional formats we are used to working with (numbers in spreadsheets, for example). And fourth, people are very open about their lives on social media, which means the data set tends to be quite rich and deep. These are very powerful advantages for mining social media data for trends.