Using Social Media for Global Security

Chapter 5

Mapping and Analyzing Social Networks

Mapping and analyzing social networks can reveal the identity of key people and relationships, and track the spread of ideas. This chapter details the steps to conduct social network analysis to map and analyze social networks primarily exhibited on social media. It introduces key concepts and definitions, reviews and selects appropriate software tools to conduct the analysis, and teaches you how to use the tools to map social networks, identify influencers, and determine the proliferation of and relationship between ideas. Although this chapter focuses only on using data from social media to conduct analysis on standalone social networks, you can use the same processes and tools to conduct social network analysis on data from other sources such as financial records, and compare and combine different networks.

Key Concepts and Definitions

Social network analysis (SNA) seeks to discover the underlying rules governing the behavior of people in a social network through the use of specialized algorithms. It involves studying the relationships between people and how those relationships affect everyone in the network, and even in other networks. SNA is ideal for understanding how people use social media to form and sustain social networks, and influence people in their online networks and beyond. It can also help explain how relationships formed offline can influence relationships formed online and vice versa. Specifically, SNA can help ...