Introduction to the Minitrack on Data Analytics, Data Mining and Machine Learning for Social Media

Social media continues to reflect our daily lives.Ubiquitous mobile devices allow for immersion into social media on a nearly universal basis.As such, the blurring of the line between our online and offline worlds and personas only continues to increase.Traditional text-based platforms are increasingly turning to image and video content, with video-intensive platforms appealing more to younger generations.We are also starting to see longer threads, stories, and conversations emerging, meaning there is significance in looking at social media messages as part of a larger discussion.These shifts result in both additional challenges and opportunities for researchers to understand the role social media is playing in society.The papers in our minitrack represent the diversity of our field.We see data gathered from multiple platforms as well as new techniques to analyze these data.