Communication strategy formulation based on the analysis of social media data

Abstract

This article emphasizes the fact that the Internet has become an important part of today's communication and, as such, should be integrated into the process of communication strategy development. It addresses issues of expanding the information base in order to get a more thorough analysis of the environment, target audiences, and competitors which could be later used in the process of communication planning. Social media, and particularly the social network Facebook which provides access to the user data through the application programming interface (API), are among the most promising sources of information. The Authors overview different methods of social media mining and special tools which could be used for retrieving and processing Internet-data. They argue that the R (programming language) has a number of features which make it particularly attractive for those purposes. The Authors give then an example of R being used for a typical first-step analysis of competitors' Facebook-pages.