Social media analytics or SMA, is the practice of gathering data from social media websites and analyzing that data to make business decisions. The most common use of social media analytics is to mine customer sentiment to support marketing and customer service activities and turns the vast amounts of semi-structured and unstructured social media data into actionable business insights. Depending on the business objectives, social media analytics can take four different forms. The first two are reactive in nature, while third and fourth are proactive in nature. First is descriptive analytics. Descriptive analytics gather and describe social media data in the form of reports, visualizations, and clustering to understand a well-defined business problem or opportunity. Second is diagnostic analytics, it can distill this data into a single view to see what worked in the past campaigns and what didn't. Third is predictive analytics, it involves analyzing large amounts of accumulated social media data to predict a future event. And the last one is prescriptive analytics, it suggests the best action to take when handling a scenario. Read more at: http://www.analyticbridge.com/profiles/blogs/4-types-of-social-media-analytics-explained