Towards the Discipline of Social Media Intelligence

We are living through a revolution in how we communicate. Every month, 1.2 billion of us now use Internet sites, apps, blogs and fora to post, share and view content.1 Loosely grouped as new, ‘social’ media, these platforms provide the means by which the Internet is increasingly being used: to par. ticipate, to create and to share information about ourselves and our friends, our likes and dislikes, movements, thoughts and transactions. The largest, Facebook, has over a billion regular users, but the linguistic, cultural and functional reach of social media is much broader, from social bookmarking to niche networks, video aggregation and social curation.2 Linkedln, a spe. cialist business network, has 200 million users, the Russian-language VK net. work 190 million users and the Chinese QQ network 700 million users.3