Chapter 1. Getting Started with R and Social Media Analytics

The invention of computers, digital electronics, social media, and the Internet have truly ushered us from the industrial age into the information age. The Internet, and more specifically the invention of World Wide Web in the early 1990s, helped people to build an inter-connected universal platform where information can be stored, shared and consumed by anyone with an electronic device capable of connecting to the Web. This has led to the creation of vast amounts of information, ideas and opinions which people, brands, organizations and businesses want to share with everyone around the world. So, social media was born which provides interactive platforms to post content, share ideas, messages and opinions about everything under the sun.

This book will take you on a journey to understand various popular social media, analyzing rich data generated by these media and gaining valuable insights. We will focus on social media which cater to audiences in different forms, like micro-blogging, social networking, software collaboration, news and media sharing platforms. The main objective is to use standardized data access and retrieval techniques using social media application programming interfaces (APIs) to gather data from these websites and apply different data mining, statistical and machine learning, and natural language processing techniques on the data by leveraging the R programming language. This book will provide you with the tools, techniques, and approaches which would help you achieve the same. This introductory chapter will cover several important concepts which would help you get a jumpstart on social media analytics. They are mentioned as follows:

• Social media – significance and pitfalls
• Social media analytics – opportunities and challenges
• Getting started with R
• Data analytics
• Machine learning
• Text analytics

We will look at social media, the various forms of social media which exist today, and how it has impacted our society. This will help us understand the entire scope pertaining to social media analytics and the opportunity presented by it which would be valuable for consumers as well as businesses and brands. Concepts related to analytics, machine learning and text analytics coupled with hands on examples depicting the various features of the R programming language will help you get a grip on essential things which are necessary for the rest of this book. Without further delay, let's get started!