Social Media Analysis as a New Research Tool — An Exploratory Study to Determine the Reliability and Validity of Analyses on the Social Web

Abstract

The Internet has increasingly changed from a pure uni-directional information medium to a multi-directional exchange medium and thus nowadays holds a strong position in peoples’ daily life. Today, the worl-wide-web is used for information search and for vivid interchange of opinions and ideas amongst consumers. Especially the communication between users has experienced an enormous boom during the last decade. Out of the 140 billions monthly visited web sites, about 25% are social media like facebook, google+, and twitter (Rösch 2010). Social Media offers users a platform on which people all over the world can talk about their desires and need as well as about products or brands online (Theobald 2009). Listening to these discussions is worth for companies because this so called user-generated content presents a large and mainly free accessible knowlegde base (Schaffner and Mohr 2009).