Frequently Asked Questions

Did you know that there are nearly 4.62 billion people on social media? This means over half of the world is either on Twitter - tweeting, on TikToking, posting videos, or live streaming on YouTube about the things they love, that interest them, bother them, and everything in between.

Companies harness these data types to derive actionable insights and drive their business forward. That’s where social media intelligence becomes useful, as it gives brands the ability to make decisions based on customer insights derived from social media and establish a meaningful relationship with them. With an understanding of SMI, brands can develop marketing strategies.

The Post Graduate Certification program in Social Media Analytics and Intelligence helps professionals build insightful understanding, thus helping their company conquer the social media space, enhance the brand’s presence, and conquer new audiences while retaining the present.

The Post Graduate Certification program in Social Media Analytics and Intelligence by IIIT Hyderabad in association with TalentSprint enables professionals to build practical skills to use proven research methodologies for effective social media analysis and intelligence.

• IIITH edge: Leverage career opportunities with globally recognized certification from India’s top-ranked engineering and research institution.
• High Impact Format: Leverage distinctive pedagogy of LIVE Online Sessions, hackathons, capstone projects, and a campus visit.
• Accomplished Faculty: Curriculum taught by accomplished faculty with research credentials from premier institutions.
• Hands-On Labs: Apply concepts in practice labs with real data.
• Hi-Tech Hi-Touch Hybrid Learning: Build expertise 24x7 with AI-powered iPearl.ai

The program is ideal for

• Professionals interested in becoming a Social Media Intelligence Analyst
• Professionals working in roles such as OSINT Analysts (Open Source Intelligence), Social Media Analysts, Fact Checkers, Intelligence Professionals, Law Enforcement Professionals, Journalists, Research Professionals, Headhunters/Recruiters

You will learn from eminent IIITH faculty who are acknowledged experts in social media analytics, social network analysis, AI/ML and Cyber Security. Meet your faculty here

To enroll in this program, you will require a

• Bachelor’s degree with a minimum of 50% marks and 
• Minimum 1 year of professional experience

The program will be delivered in an interactive online format, retaining effectiveness while maintaining safety. The format uniquely combines the benefits of an in-class program with the flexibility and safety of online learning.

• Synchronous program delivery by expert faculty
• Interact and get doubts answered by faculty
• Peer learning through working in groups with other participants
• Support from mentors for projects
• Re-attend classes through recorded archives
• Access videos easily with searchable and indexed video archives
• Learn from the comfort and safety of your home
• Office hours with one-on-one mentor support

Your peer group will include Social Media Analysts, Intelligence Professionals, OSINT Analysts, Marketing Analytics professionals, and more.

This is an expertise-building program for experienced professionals. You will obtain a certification from IIIT Hyderabad.

A certificate of successful completion is provided upon completion of all program requirements. IIIT Hyderabad carries out all examinations and evaluations related to the certification.

The program format with LIVE Interactive Sessions, Industry Capstone Projects, Hands-On Labs, Hackathons, and Campus immersion enables a conducive environment to network with your peers in the cohort. Most participants can continue to network even after the cohort by using the alumni portal.

As an institution of national importance, IIITH is a UGC, NAAC, and AICTE recognized institution. It has consistently been ranked and appreciated by the GoI recognized scientific innovation and education councils. Hence this is a fully approved certification program offered through IIITH.

All participants must execute, before the start of the program, an agreement that consists of the standard program Terms and Conditions. It has the following components:

Part A:

• Etiquette and Platform Rights
• Classroom Etiquette & General Policy Guidelines
• Tools and Platforms in Use
• Tools and Platforms: Terms of Use

Part B:

• Honor Code

Part C:

• Certification

Part D:

• Program Fee, Refund, and Termination Policy

Candidates will be selected based on the details of education, work experience, and a statement of purpose submitted along with the application.

A Relationship Manager will be assigned to the applicant, who will gather all the necessary information and represent his/her candidature to the selection committee for review. The profiles will be sent to IIITH for selection.

Join in these easy steps:

• Share your details and apply for the program
• Submit all the necessary documents
• The program selection committee will evaluate your candidature
• Upon selection, complete your enrollment and join the program

Program Orientation

• Course outcomes
• Course logistics
• Brief theory and examples about Social media analysis and CSS

Social Media Analytics

• Introduction to data collection from social media
  • APIs - Twitter, Reddit (Pushshift.io)
  • Web Crawling
    • BeautifulSoup
    • Selenium
    • Legality and Ethics of crawling
  • Data Handling practices - DBs
  • Continuous, and Realtime collection
• Introduction to social network analysis
  • Data attributes (Twitter and Reddit)
  • Quantitative distributions
    • Finding influencers using follower/following counts
    • Time series distributions
    • Detecting anomalies (Virality detection)
  • Language analysis
    • Pre-processing: Tokenization, Stop words (Custom stop words using tf-idf), Stemming and Lemmatization
    • Word Clouds and Chatter Plots
    • Topic modeling
    • Introduction to Code switch and Code mix data
  • Network Analysis
    • Building Network (Nodes, edges, edge properties)
    • Visualizing Networks
    • Network topology and what they can mean in social networks
    • Centrality metrics and inference with respect to social networks: Page Rank - Popularity, Betweenness - Community Gatekeepers, Degree - Reach
    • Community detection
• Social Media Marketing 101
  • Tools for social media analysis: TweetDeck, Bufferly and other listening tools

Security on Social Media

• Trust, credibility, & fake news on social media
  • Evolution of the term fake news (Eg. Credibility-Hoax-Rumor-Fake News-Misinformation-Disinformation)
  • Defining different terminology mentioned above
  • Types of fake news
  • Different ways by which problem is tacked
    • Detection (Content and context based)
    • Propagation
    • Intervention
• Spam, phishing, frauds, hate crime, abuse, extremism via online social media

Privacy on Social Media

• Information privacy disclosure, revelation, and its effects in online social media
• Privacy on social media: challenges, implication, opportunities
• Tracking social footprint/identities across different social network
  • Attribute based - Matching is done based on metadata like username, photo, DOB, check-ins, etc.
  • Language based - Language models are used to identify users based on writing styles
  • Network based - Network features of two networks are compared to identify node representing the same user.
• Collateral damage due to information leakage
• Consumer behavior, analytics & applications
• Effective and usable privacy setting and policies on online social media

Ethics, bias on online social media

• Broader definition of Ethics & Bias in technology space
• Ethics & Bias related to online social media
• Studies (online social and otherwise) that had questionable ethical methodologies

Computational Social Science on Online Social Media

• Computer Science and Social media as a tool to conduct social science research
  • New data collection frontiers: Online user studies, historic social media data
  • Mass collaborations
  • Large scale (potentially global) experiments
• Examples of using Sociology and Psychological theories to decide research directions
• Multimodal Classification of social media data (taught via use cases of CSS)
  • NLP + large language models
  • Computer vision and CNNs
  • Graph Neural Network
• Causal Experiment design
  • Causation vs Correlation
  • Basics of causal inference
    • Treatment and control
    • Effect
    • Confounders and Covariates
  • Randomized control trials
  • Methods
    • Propensity score
    • Regression discontinuity
    • Difference in Difference
    • Survival analysis and CoX regression
    • Double ML
• Challenges while using social media data
  • Text as a confounder
  • Platform dynamics as a confounder
  • Accounting of unavailable data
• Hybrid methods - User studies + Computational analysis

The program starts in March 2023.

It's a 6-month executive program.

The program includes

• Live Interactive Sessions by IIITH Faculty
• One Campus Visit to IIIT Hyderabad
• Best-in-class Self-learning Content, Hands-On Labs, Hackathons, and Industry Capstone Projects

The program will be delivered through faculty-led interactive live sessions on TalentSprint’s ipearl.ai. These online sessions will be held at a schedule convenient for working professionals. Participants will be able to interact with the faculty through video, audio, and chat. They will also be able to chat with fellow participants of the program during online sessions.

As per the program norms, participants have to maintain at least 75% of attendance during the program. Going by the curriculum, it is recommended that participants maintain attendance for enriched learning. In the event of unavoidable circumstances, if any, one can access the recorded lectures on our platform to cover up for the missed sessions.

The program includes continuous formative and summative assessments. The final scores will be determined based on the sum of scores of various assessments.

Yes, participants are required to have their laptops.

Reading material (pre/post session) will be shared regularly through the Online Learning Management System. The access will be available for 12 Months from the date of the commencement of the program.

A certificate of successful completion is provided upon completion of all requirements of the program. IIITH carries out all examinations and evaluations related to the certification.

For program fee-related details, please visit here.You can also contact program RM Tarun to know more.

Flexible EMI options are available that enable you to pay the program fee in installments. Please reach out to your RM to know more about the schemes available.

Yes. For scholarship-related details, please visit here. You can also reach out to your RM Tarun for more details.

No, the application fee is non-refundable.

No. The program fee is non-refundable and non-transferable under any circumstances.

Professionals have multiple options for funding.

• Sponsored by employer
• Self-funded: Based on our experience of enabling 3000+ professionals who have participated in our executive programs, self-funding is the most preferred option, with over 80% choosing this.

Three key reasons why professionals opt for it:

• Freedom: To opt for a program of their choice, at a time of their choice, with an institution of their choice and not be restrained by the organization’s policy.
• Flexibility: To pursue greater career opportunities well even beyond their current employer or to nurture their entrepreneurial ambitions.
• Funding: Access to flexible EMI schemes (paying as low as Rs. 6,884 per month).

We have also observed that the commitment levels were higher among self-funding participants.

iPearl.ai (Interactive Platform for Experiential and Remote Learning) is created by TalentSprint’s engineering team led by its Chief Technology Officer, an IIT Kanpur alumni. The platform integrates best-in-class open source technologies and SaaS services and perfected them over the last seven years.

When this platform was built, the objective was to offer it to TalentSprint’s partners and customers for digital learning and delivery. Since 2013, the platform has been extensively used by IISc, IIM Calcutta, IIT Kanpur, IIIT Hyderabad, and IIT Hyderabad, and many more of our customers and partners. To date, more than 300,000 students have used this platform, which is reputed for user experience, quality, and scale.

This feature-rich platform has become so popular that some of the partners are now using it for their academic needs.

The tried and tested direct-to-device platform enables 24 x 7 learning for its users. Some key benefits of the platform are:

• Intuitive student experience through a user-friendly LMS
• Seamless faculty experience through state-of-the-art Studios
• Highly Interactive Online Classes
• Effective group/peer learning/projects through Breakout Rooms
• Proctored Online Assessments with detailed analysis
• Insightful Reports on student engagement and performance
• Flexible integration with other components, as needed

A comparative study of iPearl.ai against Canvas, Impartus, Moodle, Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom was conducted. Features in the following categories were compared:

• Instructor-led Learning
• Self-paced Learning
• Assessments/Evaluations
• User Experience
• Customer Support
• Scalability and Performance
• Integration and Customization
• Others

Do not worry. In case you miss a session, you will be given access to view the recorded version of the session soon.

• An internet-connected device, Computer/Laptop/Tablet/Smartphone, is enough to access the platform.
• Web camera and Mic with necessary power backup will be needed for proctored online assessments.

• Largest CS Research Group in India
• #2 in All India Best Engineering Colleges - India Today
• #1 Private University in India - Education World India Higher Education Rankings for 2022 - 23
• Recognized by ARIIA 2021 - GoI

Over the years, IIIT Hyderabad has evolved strong research programs in various areas, emphasizing technology and applied research for industry and society. The institute facilitates interdisciplinary research and a seamless flow of knowledge. Several world-renowned centers of excellence are part of IIITH’s research portfolio. It has established various joint collaboration and co-innovation models with an industry outreach spanning significant national and multinational companies. For more information, please visit www.iiit.ac.in

• 10 Years of Excellence
• 200K Empowered Professionals
• 95% Completion Rate
• 85 Net Promoter Score
• Indian Achievers Award 2022 for Best EdTech Company

Established in 2010, TalentSprint is a part of NSE group and a global edtech company that brings transformational high-end and deep-tech learning programs to young and experienced professionals. The company’s digital learning platform ipearl.ai offers a hybrid onsite/online experience to seekers of deep technology expertise. TalentSprint partners with top academic institutions and global corporations to create and deliver world class programs, certifications, and outcomes.Its programs have consistently seen a high engagement rate and customer delight. It is a leading Innovation Partner for the National Skill Development Corporation, an arm of the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Government of India. A recipient of various prestigious accolades, TalentSprint was recently honored with the Indian Achievers Award 2022, for its excellence in building deeptech talent in India. For more information about TalentSprint, visit TalentSprint website