Netlytic

I used Netlytic for the first time a few days ago for our assignment. I haven’t dealt much in external social media analytics before this. Netlytic is a “community-supported text and social networks analyzer that can automatically summarize and visualize public online conversations on social media sites” and was “made for researchers by researchers, no programming/API skills required,” as per their About page. It’s fairly easy once you understand what the deal is.

Netlytic requires you to make an account and then plug in your own social media for whatever site you’re trying to analyze. Luckily, it’s a free service at its base, but you can pay to upgrade your account and keep more data sets. I only needed one and the free version has three sets, so I’m good. I wasn’t keen on plugging my own social media account in to analyze hashtags or accounts that aren’t related to me, but you do what you gotta do, you know?

Netlytic allows datasets for Twitter, YouTube, Google Sheets, Text Files, RSS, and Reddit. After you put your own social media in, you follow the directions. You name your data set, choose a language, a location (or a radius), as well as choose keywords, hashtags, and relevant accounts. Once the website extracts and analyzes the data, you can look through it and mess around however you want to see what changes. I can definitely see how this would be helpful to people using it for business purposes.