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Social media measurement or 'social media monitoring' Social media measurement or 'social media monitoring' is a way of computing popularity of a brand or company by extracting information from social media channels, such as blogs, wikis, news sites, micro-blogs such as Twitter, social networking sites, video/photo sharing websites, forums, message boards and user-generated content from time to time. In other words, this is the way to caliber success of social media marketing strategies used by a company or a brand. It is also used by companies to gauge current trends in the industry. The process first gathers data from different websites and then performs analysis based on different metrics like time spent on the page, click through rate, content share, comments, text analytics to identify positive or negative emotions about the brand.

Social Media Measurement process starts with defining a goal that needs to be achieved and defining expected outcome of the process. The expected outcome varies per the goal and is usually measured by variety of metrics. This is followed by defining possible social strategies to be used to achieve the goal. Then the next step is designing strategies to be used and setting up configuration tools which eases the process of collecting the data. In next step, strategies and tools are deployed in real time. This step involves conducting Quality Assurance tests of the methods deployed to collect the data. And in final step, data collected from the system is analyzed and if need arises, is refined on the run time to enhance the methodologies used. The last step ensures that the result obtained is more aligned with the goal defined in the first step.

Data Acquisition
Acquiring data from social media is in demand of an exploring the user participation and population with the purpose of retrieving and collecting so many kinds of data(ex: comments, downloads etc.). There are several prevalent techniques to acquire data such as Network traffic analysis, Ad-hoc application and Crawling

Network Traffic Analysis - Traffic sniffing and analysis technique that obtain streaming packet from the network links and then further analyze the request and response interaction process occurred in social media. However concerned about the potential tort of privacy on the Internet, network traffic analysis is always restricted by the government. Furthermore, high speed links are not adaptable to traffic analysis because the possible overload problem according to the packet sniffing mechanism

Ad-hoc Application - Ad-hoc application is a kind of application that provide services and games to social network users by developing the APIs offered by social network company(Facebook Developer Platform). The infrastructure of Ad-hoc application allow the user to interact with the interface layer instead of the application servers. The API provide path for application to access information after the user login.

Crawling - Crawling is the most popular technique for data acquisition and is also well-known for its easy operation based on prevalent Object-Orientated Programming Language (Java or Python etc.). And most important, social network companies (YouTube, Flicker, Facebook, Instagram and etc.) are friendly to crawling technique by providing public APIs

For brands
Social media monitoring allows users to find insights into a brand's overall visibility on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, identify opportunities for engagement, assess competitor activity and share of voice, and be alerted to impending crises. It can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, brands or products. This is the work of a cross-section of groups that include market researchers, PR staff, marketing teams, social engagement and community staff, agencies and sales teams. Several different providers have created tools to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels from blogging to internet video to internet forums. This allows companies to track what consumers are saying about their brands and actions. Companies can then react to these conversations and interact with consumers through social media platforms.

Quantifying social media
Social media management software (SMMS) is an application program or software that facilitates an organisation's ability to successfully engage in social media across different communication channels. SMMS is used to monitor inbound and outbound conversations, support customer interaction, audit or document social marketing initiatives and evaluate the usefulness of a social media presence.

It can be difficult to measure all social media conversation. Due to privacy settings and other issues, not all social media conversation can be found and reported by monitoring tools. However, whilst social media monitoring cannot give absolute figures, it can be extremely useful for identifying trends and for benchmarking, in addition to the uses mentioned above. These findings can, in turn, influence and shape future business decisions.

In order to access social media data (posts, Tweets, and meta-data) and to analyze and monitor social media, many companies use software technologies built for business.

Location-based
Most social media networks allow users to add a location to their posts (reference all of our feeds). The location can be classified as either 'at-the-location' or 'about-the-location'. "'At-the-location' services can be defined as services where location-based content is created at the geographic location. 'About-the-location' services can be defined as services which are referring to particular location but the content is not necessarily created in this particular physical place." The added information available from geotagged (link to Geotagging article) posts means that they can be displayed on a map. This means that a location can be used as the start of a social media search rather than a keyword or hashtag. This has major implications for disaster relief, event monitoring, safety and security professionals since a large portion of their job is related to tracking and monitoring specific locations.

Technologies used
Various monitoring platforms use different technologies for social media monitoring and measurement. These technology providers may connect to the API provided by social platforms that are created for 3rd party developers to develop their own applications and services that access data. Facebook's Graph API is one such API that social media monitoring solution products would connect to pull data from. Technology companies may also get social data from a data reseller, such as DataSift or Gnip, which was acquired by Twitter. Some social media monitoring and analytics companies use calls to data providers each time an end-user develops a query. A small number of companies, including Crimson Hexagon, archive and index social media posts, which provides end users with on-demand access to historical data and enables methodologies and technologies leveraging network and relational data.

Additional monitoring companies use crawlers and spidering technology to find keyword reference. (See also: Semantic analysis, Natural language processing.) Basic implementation involves curating data from social media on a large scale and analyzing the results to make sense out of it.