  The emergence of online social media services has made a qualitative leap and
brought profound changes to various aspects of human, cultural, intellectual,
and social life. These significant Big data tributaries have further
transformed the businesses processes by establishing convergent and transparent
dialogues between businesses and their customers. Therefore, analysing the flow
of social data content is necessary in order to enhance business practices, to
augment brand awareness, to develop insights on target markets, to detect and
identify positive and negative customer sentiments, etc., thereby achieving the
hoped-for added value. This chapter presents an overview of Social Big Data
term and definition. This chapter also lays the foundation for several
applications and analytics that are broadly discussed in this book.
