# The Role of Social Network Analysis in Social Media Research
## 2 The Significance of This Study  
The most important significance of this study is to introduce social network analysis into the studies of social media usage and to bring a paradigm shift in social media research, which emphasizes that the systematic and relative perspective should be the proper research method for dynamic social interactions. Social network analysis, which investigates online interactions on a highly abstract and simplified level, enables researchers to measure the complex process of social media usage in dynamic and transient social contexts. The academic and practical significance of the introduction of social network analysis into social network analysis is introduced in the following sections.  
In the aspect of academics, social network analysis may result in a paradigm shift in research methodology regarding social media usage. Regression analysis for relationships between factors is universally used in the empirical studies on social media usage that have been published in the last decade [6; 7]. However, because these factors were derived from particular social contexts, they might have different effects on social media usage in other social contexts. For instance, the variable of attitude could have more effect on behaviors in the culture of individualism than in the culture of collectivism because the collective culture values group goals more than individual goals, which makes individual attitude less important than in individualism culture [2; 4; 6]. Because social media use is the result of the interaction of a series of intricate social processes, it is nearly impossible to identify all the factors that participate in these social processes. As a result, scholars must constantly elicit new factors to adjust to transient contexts, and these new factors might not have the same interpretation capabilities when social processes change, which wastes effort to an extent.  
Social network analysis adopts a systematic approach to capture the transient features of social media usage by focusing on the outcomes of interaction rather than precedent factors of interaction, which contrasts with the method of constantly creating new factors to explain social media usage in various social contexts. The shift of research focus may save researchers from defining additional, occasionally semantic overlapping factors and aid in their better intuitive understanding of the entire social media usage process.  
With regard to the aspect of practical significance, social network analysis could show how various groups of people use social media in various social contexts, which could be useful to those who are interested in the spread of information and influence, the dissemination of innovations, or the effects of advertising. There is a survey that claims that 65.2% of online users receive information about their social lives on social media from their networks, making network interactions on social media one of the most significant loci of social media usage [1; 8; 9]. Therefore, understanding the mechanism of interactions on social media could help people from the corporate, public administration, and other sectors to more accurately comprehend the effects of using social media.  
An overview of the literature on social network analysis and studies of social media usage is given in the following sections of this article. To enable a shift in research methodology for the study of social media usage, the goal of this review paper is to evaluate the possibility of integrating social network analysis into social media studies. For discussion, the potential hypotheses will also be given.