Big Data vs. Data Mining for Social Media Analytics

Social media provides an easy way for users to share information and to generate huge amounts of data. Exploring this data allows to extract actionable patterns that can be useful for institutions, business, users or consumers. Social media data are noisy, unstructured, and dynamic and these characteristics lead to novel challenges. Data mining, on the one hand, and Big Data, on the other hand, are two approaches that, using specific methods and technologies, allow social media data analysis. This paper aims to present an overview of how social media analytics can be made using both data mining and Big Data techniques.