Towards the Discipline of Social Media Intelligence

Abstract

We are living through a revolution in how we communicate. Every month, 1.2 billion of us now use Internet sites, apps, blogs and fora to post, share and view content.¹ Loosely grouped as new, ‘social’ media, these platforms provide the means by which the Internet is increasingly being used: to par. ticipate, to create and to share information about ourselves and our friends, our likes and dislikes, movements, thoughts and transactions. The largest, Facebook, has over a billion regular users, but the linguistic, cultural and functional reach of social media is much broader, from social bookmarking to niche networks, video aggregation and social curation.² Linkedln, a spe. cialist business network, has 200 million users, the Russian-language VK net. work 190 million users and the Chinese QQ network 700 million users.³