The social media

Can social media predict the future?Sharethis pageA road map to our thoughts?Looking for cluesSentiment analysisOne step aheadDoes social media get it wrong?Where next?A road map to our thoughts?Presented byMarcus du SautoyScientist and broadcasterIn a global population of over seven billion people, more than two billion of us use social media. It's estimated that each day we send out over 300 million tweets and share 4.75 billion pieces of content on Facebook.By liking a new Hollywood blockbuster here or tweeting about a visit to a restaurant there, we are helping to create an enormous pool of information about how we live our lives.Social media analysts are busy sifting through this to build up a detailed enough picture of our habits and preferences to allow them to accurately predict how we will behave in the future. Many say they already can – but how?Looking for cluesSearch engines study our search terms to find patterns that match patterns in real events. This gives them an accurate indicator of what might be expected to happen in the future. A similar approachis being applied to social media.Marcus du Sautoy learns from Corrie Conrad how Google spotted a similarity between patterns of online activity and past flu rates that allowed it to predict future epidemics.Sentiment analysisFacebook 'Like'Our social media posts have one key quality that is missing from the terms we type into Google or Bing – they often contain emotion.What we like on Facebook, dislike on YouTube or generally spout about on Twitter – and even the emojis we use – all offer an indication of what we think about a whole range of topics.This gives social media analysts something else to go on in terms of predicting what we might do in the future.Combined with other data gleaned from our everyday web use, it can help analysts to predict trends. And that is something that will interest anyone from a consumer-related businessman to a political election strategist.One step aheadClick or tap on the hand to discover how analysts are using social media data to predict the future in four walks of life.Does social media get it wrong?An online crystal ball? Not quite yet. Social media is littered with fake accounts, false intentions and half-truths, and the analysts can still make mistakes.