There are many services that will generate wordclouds and simple graphs from the conversations on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. These services use Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) to access the data on the platforms then perform various analysis on that data. These tools are often very limited in their functionality, or are very expensive to use for large-scale ongoing analysis and even then they often don't cover all the needs of a dynamic organization. This presentation will demonstrate how to programmatically access the APIs of several social media platforms to pull out specific data, store it in a database, and perform custom analysis on it to meet the needs of various business cases. We'll take a look at how different social media platforms are better suited for gleaning different kinds of data. This includes Twitter and Facebook as well as various blog and location-based platforms. Specific business cases will be shown around marketing, communications, competitive intelligence, crisis management, and return on investment analysis. Attendees of this presentation will leave with a better understanding of how looking at the universe of online conversation as a whole can provide valuable insight into what consumers are thinking and interested in at any given moment.
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP5656
