Abstract:

Social media can be defined as online communities formed through electronic means of communication in order to share users' content they create. Especially in recent years, rapidly increasing use rate of social media has transformed social media from being only an interpersonal medium and turned into a social communication tool. Social media is now used effectively in education and training activities, political communication campaigns, businesses, corporate image studies, public diplomacy, international relation, in many areas related to life and scientific studies. Since social media has become a phenomenon internalized by all stakeholders at the focal point of life, revealing the thematic development map of the research in the field of social media is important in terms of following new trends. With this research prepared for this purpose, the developments in the field of social media in the last fifteen years were examined periodically. First of all, article data to be used in the research were obtained from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection database. On 04.12.2019, the term “social media” was searched in the “title” tab in the WoS database and 17.406 publications were reached. Only “article" type publications were selected and a bibliometric analysis was conducted for 9.516 article data using the Science Mapping Analysis Tool (SciMAT) program and science mapping method. In order to evaluate the developments in the field of social media on a periodic basis, the data of the articles were analyzed comparatively in three five-year periods as “2005-2009”, “2010-2014” and “2015-2019”. As a result of the analyzes, it is seen that the number of articles published in the field of social media has increased significantly, the USA is the most published country, “social media” was the engine theme of the “2005-2009” period, “social media”, “participation”, “word of mouth marketing”, “network” were the engine theme of the “2010-2014” period, “social media”, “word of mouth marketing”, “political participation” and “adolescents” were the engine theme of “2015-2019” period.

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