Social media network Analysis: TAGS to start with

I am fascinated by connections and seeing connections between things, One area that particularly intrigues me is people connecting via social media and Twitter in particular.

Where to start?
I would suggest try the brilliant tool TAGS https://tags.hawksey.info/ by Martin Hawksey (@mhawskey), it is free and collects Twitter data and puts it into a Google Sheet. I won't describe setting it up if you click on https://tags.hawksey.info/get-tags/ it takes you through the process. You will need both a Twitter and a Google account to use it, but after that it is free and the spreadsheet is stored on Google's servers.


Once set up you can just start searching, below is an image of search (entered in box 2) for #socmedhe OR #socmedhe TAGS on Twitter.

From the TAGS pull-down menu you can start your search by  Run Now!

There are a number of nice features. As two examples

• once you have it set-up there is an option to update it every hour after the initial run. This means you just leave it running and let Google do the work.
• Click on the Share button and get a shareable link for Anyone with the link can view. do this means you can visualise the  tweets using the TAGSExplorer, which gives a clickable URL (e.g. http://hawksey.info/tagsexplorer/?key=1S23uOXD-BaWX4MnShveTk3LY32II3p4wEZ4G4B-h1fg&gid=400689247 )  and you get a graph similar to the one below showing links to between people based on replies. The ones with no links to them didn't reply or were not replied to; but they may have been mentioned or retweeted.  There are also four tabs where you can list things like who tweeted using the hashtags or top hashtags associate with this hashtags.

At the bottom right-hand-side of the screen there links to add retweets or mentions. Adding mentions you can get a graph similar to the one below (mentions are the dashed line and the solid line is a reply):

There are plenty of other features to look at but I will leave them to you to play with. To get going the following may be of use:

• Link to the TAGS spreadsheet used in this example: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1S23uOXD-BaWX4MnShveTk3LY32II3p4wEZ4G4B-h1fg/edit?usp=sharing 
• Link to the interactive graph: http://hawksey.info/tagsexplorer/?key=1S23uOXD-BaWX4MnShveTk3LY32II3p4wEZ4G4B-h1fg&gid=400689247

In the next post moving TAGS to another tool Gephi to analyse the data further will be discussed.











All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with. Twitter: @scottturneruon