Faculty Author: Katja Reuter
Course: Using Social Media Data to Gain Community Insights and Inform Organizational Strategy Workshops
Department or School: The Digital Scholar Training Initiative
Student Population: Graduate students from varied departments
Duration: 2 2‐hour workshops
Deliverables:
Keywords: writing, data, analysis, essay, research paper, social media, infographics, Symplur, Twitter, health
Summary: Students extract data from a social‐media database to answer health-‐related questions, and produce infographics of their results.
Assignment Goals: In this workshop, you will learn how to use social media data (social media listening) to gain insights into emerging community needs, trends, and conversations. During the workshop, you will get access to Symplur Signals, a database of disease- and healthcare-related Twitter user messages (tweets), hashtags, and Twitter user profiles.
In workshop 1, using a series of example studies, Symplur representatives will show you how to best use Symplur Signals and explain the types of questions that can be answered leveraging this type of social media data. In workshop 2, students will work in groups of four to complete one of the proposed analysis projects and develop data reports.
Recommended Tools:
Faculty Author Advice: It is important to be up‐front with students about the work expectations for this project. The cost of access to the Symplur database is a significant barrier to its use at the university.