4.

Social Media Location

Analytics

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Contents
● Sources of Location Data
● Categories of Location Analytics
● Location Analytics and Privacy Concerns
● Location Analytics Tools

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Location Analytics
● Location analytics, also known as spatial analysis or geo-analytics, involves mapping,
visualizing, and mining the location of people, data, and other resources.
● GPS-enabled mobile devices make it possible to provide location-based services, products,
and information.
● Location analytics can be used in various sectors and can be instrumental in understanding
cities and human behaviors in space and time.
● An example of location analytics is the use of geo-located Twitter data to study of New York
City (França, Sayama et al. 2015) the "heartbeat" dataset of a city and map its dynamics.
Using the dataset, the scientist were able to study and map the waking, sleeping,
commuting, work, and leisure dynamics of the people living in the city during the
weekday and weekends. Such geo-analytics can be instrumental in better understanding
our cities and human behaviors in space and time.

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Sources of Location Data
● Postal Address
● Latitude Longitude
● GPS-based
● IP-based

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Categories of Location Analytics
● Based on its scope, location analytics can be broadly classified
into two categories:

1) Business data-driven location analytics

2) Social media data- driven location analytics.

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Business Driven Location Analytics

● Business data-driven location analytics involves mapping, visualizing, and

mining location data to reveal patterns and trends in business data.
● By capitalizing on data stored in a business database, location analytics can
provide location-specific information, products, and services based on
where customers are.
● Examples of how this can be used include recommending the nearest
convenience store or taxi, or making decisions about the best potential
location for a business warehouse.

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Applications of Business Driven Location Analytics
● Powerful Intelligence
 Simple maps can be, limited in providing insightful details
 sophisticated mapping techniques like
■ Clustering,
■ Heat mapping,
■ Data aggregation
■ Color-coded mapping
can provide more detailed and insightful business intelligence.

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Applications of Business Driven Location Analytics
● Geo Enrichment
○ Simple data maps can be enhanced with customer information such as
demographics, spending habits, lifestyle, and location.
○ This can help to answer questions such as where a company's loyal
customers spend most of their time.

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Applications of Business Driven Location Analytics
● Collaboration and Sharing
○ Maps are easy to understand and are useful for communication and collaboration within an
organization.
○ Location analytics can be used to map business data for collaboration and information
sharing with customers.
○ Business data -Google Fusion Tables, allows for the creation of maps, tables, and charts.

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2) Social Media Data Driven Location Analytics
● Recommendation Purposes
● Customer Segmentation -Tweepsmap (https://tweepsmap.com/), can be used to geo-locate your
Twitter followers by state, or city.
● Advertisement-Location-based advertisement allows targeted marketing and promotion campaign
mostly delivered through mobile devices to reach specific target audiences.
● Information Request- Based on their current location, customers can request a product, service, or
resource (e.g., the nearest coffee shop, restaurant, or parking lot).
● Alerts - Location data can be used to send and receive alerts and notifications, such as sales and
promotion alerts traffic congestion alerts, speed limit warnings, and storm warnings etc.
● Search and Rescue - Location data is vital in search and rescue operations e.g. disaster
management.
● Navigation - Mobile and GPS-based navigation services and apps can help users find addresses. An
example of this is the BE-ON-ROAD app for Android devices, which offers offline turn-by-turn GPS
navigation.

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Location Analytics and Privacy Concerns
● Location-based services can bring convenience and value to businesses, but they also raise privacy
concerns.
● These concerns include the need for transparency about location tracking, user control over the
storage of location information, and options for preserving anonymity.
● There are also questions about legal protection for historical location data against unreasonable
searches, and the appropriate level of disclosure control.
● There is a need for appropriate governmental regulation to protect citizens' privacy rights in the era
of location-aware mobile devices.

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Location Analytics Tools
● Google Fusion Tables is a web service for geo-tagging, storing, sharing, querying, and visualizing
tabular business data on Google Maps.
● Agos is a platform for geo-tagging and reporting that helps communities address climate change
and disaster risk reduction.
● Tweepsmap maps Twitter followers by location.
● Trendsmap is a real-time tool that maps the latest trends from Twitter.
● Followerwonk is a tool for performing basic Twitter analytics such as analyzing followers, location,
and tweeting patterns.
● Esri's GIS software is used for mapping, visualizing, questioning, analyzing, and interpreting data to
understand relationships, patterns, and trends.

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Questions
● Define location analytics.
● Explain the two main categories of location analytics.
● What are the sources of location data.
● What are the main applications of business data-driven location analytics?
● What are the main applications of social media data-driven location
analytics?
● Discuss privacy concerns related to location analytics.

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4. Search Engines Analytics

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Introduction
● Search Engines are the gateways to social media and help users search for and find
information
● A search engine is an Internet service or software designed to search information on
the web that corresponds to a request (e.g., keywords) specified by the user
● search engines play a crucial role in helping us find the right information in a limited
amount of time.

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Types of Search Engines:

Crawler-
Based

Search
Engine
Types Metasearch
Directories
engines

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Types of Search Engines
Crawler-Based
○ Crawler-based search engines create their databases or lists automatically, without any human
intervention.
■ Examples: Google.com and Bing.com
○ They operate in three steps:
● Web Crawling: Search engines start by collecting and storing information about web pages. This mechanism
is termed web crawling. A web crawler (also known as web spider or bot) is a computer program or software
specifically designed to collect and store data about websites for indexing.
● Indexing: Indexing helps classify a website correctly for searching purposes. The data crawled or extracted is
then indexed and stored in a database for quick access. Every search engine may follow different techniques
for indexing web page data. Common indexing techniques include storing meta tags (which are used in the
header of a web page and provide descriptions of the website) and keywords related to a website.
● Searching: Searching is the final step in search engine operations. When a user requests specific information
by entering keywords in a search engine, the search engine queries the index and provides a list of the most
relevant web pages by matching it with the indexed keywords. However, it may not be that simple; search
engines use a variety of factors to rank and provide a list of matching websites.
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Types of Search Engines

2. Directories
● The listings in directories are manually
compiled and created by human editors.
○ Examples: Yahoo Directory, Open Directory, and
LookSmart.

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Types of Search Engines

3. Meta search Engines

● Meta search engines compiles and
display results from other search
engines.
○ Examples: Metacrawler, Mamma, and Dogpile

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Types of Search Engines based on Scope

1. Local Search Engines

2. Global Search Engines

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Search Engine Analytics

● Search Engine Analytics can mean two

things:

1. Search Engine Optimization and

2. Search Engine Trend Analysis.

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1. Search Engine Optimization
● Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are the techniques used to improve a
website’s ranking in a search engine result page (SERP).

● SERP generally have two types of results:

○ Organic, and
○ nonorganic search results.

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Importance of SERP
● Internet users pay closer attention to the top results on search engines.

● High rankings on SERPs can mean more Internet traffic to a website

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Understanding SERP Mechanism

● Google’s PageRank
algorithm predominantly
relies on the quality of
incoming hyperlinks (or in-
links) to rank websites.

The PageRank algorithm will place page

B higher on the SERP when compared to
D.

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Figure 1. PageRank algorithm ranking example
2. Search Trend Analytics
● Search Engine Trends Analytics deals with analyzing and understanding
the keywords people use in a search engine.

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2. Search Trend Analytics
● Search Engine Trends Analytics can help also answer a variety of
questions, including the following:

1. How people search for your brand?

2. When does interest spike in your products or services?
3. Which keywords drive more traffic?
4. Which regions are interested in your brand?
5. What are trending topics over the Internet?
6. How are your competitors performing?

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Search Engine Analytics Tools
● Google Trends
○ Google Trends (http://trends.google.com/) is a search engine analytics tool. This chapter includes a detailed
tutorial on Google Trends.
● Canopy
○ Canopy is multimedia analytics tool designed to support deep investigation of large multimedia collections, such
as images, videos, and documents. More information on Canopy is available here:
http://www.vacommunity.org/article32
● Google Alerts
○ Google Alerts (https://www.google.com/alerts) is a content detection and notification service that automatically
notifies users when new content over the Internet matches a set of search terms based on user queries.
● Icerocket
○ Icerocket (http://www.icerocket.com/) specializes in blog searches and also captures activity on Facebook, Twitter,
and Flickr.
● TweetBeep
○ TweetBeep (http://tweetbeep.com/) is like Google Alerts for Twitter.
● Social Mention
○ Social Mention (http://socialmention.com/) is similar to Google Alerts, but it only focuses on social media sites, and
you can choose to focus on particular areas, such as blogs.

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Understanding the Research Function
Table 1. Executing your research correctly

Search Terms The Results Displayed

Social media analytics Results can include searches containing the terms “social,” “media,” and
“analytics” in any order.

“Social media analytics” Results will only include the exact search terms included inside of the
quotation marks.

social + analytics Results can include searches containing the words “social” OR “analytics.”

social – analytics Results will include searches containing the word “social,” but will exclude
searches containing the word “analytics.”

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Tutorial: Search Engine Analytics with Google Trends

● Step 1: Open Google Trends:

http://www.google.com/trends/.
● Step 2: Click on the “Trends”
option in the upper left-hand
corner. Next, from the
dropdown menu, select
“Explore.”
Screenshot 1. Interest in iPhone 4, Galaxy S4, and LG
Optimus over time

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Review Questions
● What is the function of a search engine?
● Explain different types of search engines.
● Differentiate between local and global search engines.
● What is search engine analytics?
● Explain the two main categories of search engine analytics.
● What is the purpose of search engine optimization?
● What is the purpose of search engine trend analysis?

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