Define social network analysis and its main analysis methods

(SNA) - Assessment Week 3.1

Social network analysis is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, URLs, and other connected information/knowledge entities.

The first element of any social network is actors. Actors can represent, for example, e-mail addresses of the students of a class. Those actors are represented as nodes in a graph that is modeling a social network.

The next element of any social network is relations. It tells us a lot of information about the interaction between or actors such as:

• Who do people seek information and knowledge from?
• Who do they share their information and knowledge with?
• who works where and who reports to whom?
• Communication channels our actors are using; this could be emails, social media channels, study groups, social groups among some others.
• Locations
• Actor’s Profiles

3- Final element in the characteristic of the relationships is also direction.  The relations are connections that are built between nodes in the social network.  Relations will allow us to get information as well such:

• Volume of communications
• Frequency time of communications
• To identify who is/are leaders of this social network.
• Who communicate the most or less among the social network.
• Identify trending topics of the social network.
• It will help as well to identify issues in the class.

This is one of the most relevant elements of social media analysis, considering all the data’s information and its analysis you may take decision, make adjustments, include something elses, help people, etc. It will give you the complete information in order for you to act depending on the analysis you are performing.

When working with social networks, Analytics Tools represents the actors or individuals with nodes; the first step is to define the central node, from here the graphic part and measuring start connecting all those nodes with each other according to their interaction. Once we have all the data into our analytics tools, we will have a clear view of what is happening (depending on the question we want to answer) into our network.