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Learn How to Analyze Digital Media

Social media data is an asset to you and your company. This data represents an opportunity to spot emerging trends and to transform social and digital media analytics into business intelligence and actionable insights. Purdue’s Digital Media Analytics program provides an introduction to digital and social media analytics and then examines social media research, owned media, earned media, paid media, and using “listening data.”

By completing our Digital Media Analytics program, you will become a knowledgeable data consumer, informed teammate, and effective leader of teams making data-driven decisions. Data skills taught in the program include:

  • Using social media as a source of business intelligence and behavioral analytics.
  • Quantifying human behavior.
  • Engaging in simple social media data mining.
  • Interpreting findings to transform them into data-driven insights.

This program is a series of seven courses available 100% online. The courses are self-paced and you have 12 weeks of access to complete each course once you start. Students can register for the courses individually or purchase all seven to earn a Digital Media Analytics certificate from Purdue.

After completing the full certificate, you will be able to:

  • Understand the opportunities and limitations of social media data analysis
  • Differentiate between owned, earned and paid media, as well as the different strategies for using and analyzing data from each of them
  • Identify methods for using ready- and custom-made tools to transform information into insight, from data collection to analysis, interpretation, and recommendation
  • Sharpen quantitative and business analytical skills using spreadsheets and online tools
  • Write effective reports and draft scorecards
  • Be prepared to interact with data scientists by speaking their language and understanding their processes for data mining and business intelligence

Program Descriptions

The objective of this course is to lay the foundation for the rest of the courses. Students will study the constraints, opportunities and limitations of using data from social media and learn more about the basic types of social media data relevant to professionals like you, their provenance, and complexity.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

  • Discuss the constraints, opportunities and limitations of using data from social media
  • Differentiate between the basic types of social media data available for analysis
  • Identify the possibilities for using available social media data and techniques
  • Use social media data to answer questions and report actionable insights
  • Understand the different steps of social media analysis and their importance
  • Begin your hands-on analysis of Twitter data

Course topics:

  • Social media as data source
  • Three types of social media
  • What can we learn from social media
  • Introduction to social media analysis techniques and tools
  • Constraints of social media analytics
  • How to harvest social media data
  • How to organize data
  • Finding statistically significant differences between groups
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The objective of this course is to focus students’ thinking about social and digital media analytics around questions and insights. Whether through formal research for organizations or through spontaneous questions from management and other departments, you may be asked to use social and digital media data to answer questions and report actionable insights.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

  • Understand the role and importance of social media research plans, as well as how to build one
  • Describe a common approach to market research and how to use social media data for it
  • Evaluate social media research and market research plans
  • Understand and describe social media research methods
  • Create and deliver effective research reports and presentations of findings
  • Use simple but powerful Excel tools to deepen your data analysis
  • Perform quantitative social media research

Course topics:

  • Building a research plan to analyze social media behavior
  • Qualitative and quantitative methods
  • How to write effective research reports
  • Market research plans with social media
  • Analyzing social media data
  • Interpreting tabular data
  • Analysis tools in excel
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This course takes a deep dive into the different categories of social and digital data that an organization may access, including owned, paid, and earned media, with an emphasis on owned media and social media channels.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

  • Understand and describe what owned media is, what its strengths are, and how it differs from other forms of social media content
  • Explore tools used for social auditing
  • Summarize how social media auditing can improve owned media performance
  • Discuss the different categories of social media audits
  • Evaluate owned social media channels
  • Reflect on the value of earned, owned and paid media

Course topics:

  • Introduction to social media auditing
  • How and why to conduct social media audits
  • Social media auditing strategies and techniques
  • Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter analytics
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This course introduces the basic rules of thinking like a social media analyst. Students will learn how to transform the world of social media from words and actions into numbers by using the “tabular format” approach. Students will also look at how to compare, contrast, and relate variables to get at potential predictive models.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

  • Understand and describe what earned media is, what its strengths are, and how it differs from other forms of social media content
  • Describe sources of earned media and different earned media strategies
  • Evaluate earned media produced by organizations
  • Evaluate the benefits of social listening
  • Identify effective social media listening tools
  • Improve your online presence by collecting and analyzing earned media
  • Explore how brands use social listening to improve their message
  • Analyze earned media from Twitter hands-on

Course topics:

  • Understanding earned media
  • Earned media strategies and content planning
  • Social listening: what it is, why it matters, how to incorporate strategy and tools
  • How to get earned media
  • Earned media strategies for content marketing plans
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This course looks closely at how social media campaigns reverberate back onto websites. Students will learn more about various ways in which websites can be used to capture the buzz in social media if things are properly tagged and tracked. Students will also discover the richness and depth of the data provided by Google tracking, and how you can enable your site to track data through Google Analytics.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

  • Understand and describe what paid media is, what its strengths are, and how it differs from other forms of social media content
  • Describe the benefits and value of paid media
  • Understand how Google ads are structured, and how ad delivery works
  • Understand how Facebook ads are structured, and how ad delivery works
  • Select an ad objective based on your business goals
  • Create Google and Facebook campaigns, ad sets, and ads
  • Manage permissions, payment history, and payment methods

Course topics:

  • Paid media strategies
  • Google ads metrics
  • Interpreting Facebook ads
  • Understanding Twitter ads
  • Understanding YouTube ads
  • Creating effective ads
  • Using keywords
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Through this course, students will learn advanced ways to extract and analyze data from social media. These methods take advantage of the automated means of transferring data most social media offers. You will learn what API’s are, how they work, what they provide, and how you can use them to get data.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

  • Understand what APIs are and how they can be useful to your analysis
  • Use advanced ways to extract and analyze data from social media
  • Take advantage of automated means of transferring data that most social media offers
  • Use APIs to get relevant data to create actionable business insights
  • Build your own API-based tools
  • Use prebuilt API solutions
  • Understand the difference between mobile analytics and other digital analytics
  • Use metrics to measure the success of mobile ad campaigns

Course topics:

  • Introduction to APIs
  • How and why to use APIs
  • Mobile and web analytics
  • Use of augmented reality
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This course will assess your learning from the Digital Media Analytics program. You will reflect on what you have learned so far and apply the concepts taught in the previous six courses. Once completed, along with the rest of the six courses, a certificate will be awarded.

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At A Glance

Modality: Self-paced
Access: 12 weeks for each course
Starts: Open enrollment
Fee:

  • Individual courses: $300
  • Full certificate (All seven courses): $2,000

Estimated Weekly Commitment: 5-6 hours
Who Should Enroll: This course is for professionals looking to advance their careers and learn more about digital media analytics and social media. Students are not expected to know programming language. An understanding of basic statistics is expected.
Noncredit-to-credit pathway available: Online learners who complete the full certificate can request to utilize the certificate for course credit within Purdue University’s online Masters in Communication. The full certificate must be completed for request course credit.

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