Preface

The Internet has truly grown to be humongous, especially in the last decade, with the rise of various forms of social media that give users a platform to express themselves and also communicate and collaborate with each other. The current social media landscape is a complex mesh of social network platforms and applications, catering to specific audiences with unique as well as overlapping features. Each of these social networks are potential gold mines of data which are being (and can be) used to study, leverage and improve our understanding of demographics, behaviors, collaboration, user engagement, branding and so on across different domains and spheres of our lives.

This book will help the reader to understand the current social media landscape and help in understanding how analytics and machine learning can be leveraged to derive insights from social media data. It will enable readers to utilize R and its ecosystem to visualize and analyze data from different social networks. This book will also leverage machine learning, data science and other advanced concepts and techniques to solve real-world use cases spread across diverse social network domains including Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, FourSquare, StackExchange, Flickr, and more.