SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS IN HIGHER EDUCATION AND CHALLENGES

With the rapid growth of user generated content on blogs, forums, social networking and microblogging sites, social media analytics has become popular research topic in many different domains in order to shape marketing activities, management strategies, forecast trends, and for better understanding of consumers. Information spreads rapidly through social media sites and has a big impact on shaping public opinion. Negative comments about company, brand or a product/service can have drastic effects on the company's business. Since social media sites are already recognized as an important data source in other business sectors and are analyzed in order to improve business operations, these resources must be exploited and used in the field of higher education as well. The main objective of this paper is to outline the current state of social media analytics in higher education in developed countries and in the Republic of Serbia and to identify the challenges that will shape the future direction of our research.