Social Media Comparison And Analysis: The Best Data Source For Research?

In the past decade, social media has become an important part of our everyday life. The employment of different social media changes the way we communicate, collaborate, gather information and consequently perceive the world around us. Thus, researchers from different fields exploit the social media to provide deeper insight into human behaviour. Each social media possesses its own privacy politics and access to publicly available data. In this paper, we present a generic framework along with the tools to analyse different social media. The analysis shows basic usage statistics, reach and engagement differences, language, sentiment and gender identification of each social network data. We compare data from Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+ and YouTube. The results reveal specifics of each social media, which to some extent also depend on the data available and the selected seed keywords. We uncover that popularity of selected topics in social media is proportional to the number of hits on Google, celebrities and politicians are the most talked topics and that behaviour of users across social media is different. For example, Twitter users prefer to post more, while Facebook and Youtube users prefer to comment. The majority of all social media posts are in English, larger number of them are negative and often written by male users. The results of the proposed framework should serve as a tool to identify the appropriate source of data for the representative analysis of social media.