Analyzing Social Media Data in R

Course Description

Analyzing data from social media can provide you with valuable insights. It can inform campaign strategies, improve marketing and sales, measure customer engagement, perform competitor analysis, and identify untapped networks. In this course, you’ll use R to extract and visualize Twitter data, perform network analysis, and view the geolocation of tweets. You’ll use a variety of datasets to put what you’ve learned into play, including tweets about celebrities, technology companies, trending topics, and sports.

What You’ll Learn

Understanding Twitter data

Get started with understanding the power of Twitter data and what you can achieve using social media analysis. In this chapter, you’ll extract your first set of tweets using the Twitter API and functions from the powerful ‘rtweet’ library. Then it’s time to explore how you can use the components from your extracted Twitter data to derive insights for social media analysis.

Visualize Tweet texts

A picture is worth a thousand words! In this chapter, you’ll discover how you can visualize text from tweets using bar plots and word clouds. You’ll learn how to process tweet text and prepare a clean text corpus for analysis. Imagine being able to extract key discussion topics and people’s perceptions about a subject or brand from the tweets they are sharing. You’ll be able to do just that using topic modeling and sentiment analysis.

Analyzing Twitter data

It’s time to go deeper. Learn how you can apply filters to tweets and analyze Twitter user data using the golden ratio and the Twitter lists they subscribe to. You’ll also learn how to extract trending topics and analyze Twitter data over time to identify interesting insights.

Network Analysis and putting Twitter data on the map

Twitter users tweet, like, follow, and retweet creating complex network structures. In this final chapter, you’ll learn how to analyze these network structures and visualize the relationships between these individual people as a retweet network. By extracting geolocation data from the tweets you’ll also discover how to display tweet locations on a map, and answer powerful questions such as which states or countries are talking about your brand the most? Geographic data adds a new dimension to your Twitter data analysis.