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Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Creating Maps and Measures with NodeXL
Networks are a data structure commonly found in any social media service that allows populations to author collections of connections. The Social Media Research Foundation’s NodeXL project makes analysis of social media networks accessible to most users of the Excel spreadsheet application. With NodeXL, network charts become as easy to create as pie charts. Recent research created by applying the tool to a range of social media networks has already revealed the variations in network structures present in online social spaces. A recent report co-authored with the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project documents the discovery of the six basic forms of social media network structures present in social media platforms like Twitter. Maps of the connections among the people who recently said the name of a product, brand or event can reveal key positions and clusters in the crowd. Some people who talk about a topic are more in the “center” of the graph, they may be key influential members in the population. NodeXL supports the exploration of social media with import features that pull data from personal email indexes on the desktop, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Wikis, blogs and WWW hyper-links. A book Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world is available from Morgan-Kaufmann. Using NodeXL it becomes easier to “Think Link” and gain insights into networks.