Beyond the Likes: Rethinking Social Media Metrics in Research

 

When we think about social media analytics, most of us picture dashboards full of likes, shares, and retweets. But for researchers, social media is more than just popularity points, it’s actually a goldmine for understanding how ideas spread, and communities form online. This week’s unit is all about that shift: using analytics not just to boost engagement, but to really dig into human behavior and social interaction.

The article “Towards a Second Generation of Social Media Metrics” by Díaz-Faes, Bowman, and Costas (2019) does a great job of showing this. The authors point out that just counting how many times a scientific paper gets tweeted only tells part of the story. What’s even more interesting is who is sharing it and how they interact on social media. By looking at over a million Twitter users, they found patterns like super-focused science sharers, casual users who mix science with personal posts, and professional networks that help amplify certain topics.

This “second generation” of metrics turns social media into a window for understanding public engagement with science, online communities, and influence patterns. Researchers can see who’s spreading knowledge, how attention clusters, and which communities drive conversations, turning likes and retweets into meaningful insights.

The takeaway? Social media isn’t just a tool to promote stuff, it’s a space to see how ideas travel, how people connect, and how knowledge circulates online. With the researcher’s perspective, analytics become a way to understand society itself, not just measure it.



Díaz-Faes, A. A., Bowman, T. D., & Costas, R. (2019). Towards a second generation of ‘social media metrics’: Characterizing Twitter communities of attention around science. PloS one, 14(5), e0216408. retrieved from https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0216408

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