Compare methods

	Social Media Network Analysis	Hyperlink Network Analysis
Field	Communication	Communication
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2017	2006
Originator	Social network analysis tradition (Wasserman & Faust); Himelboim et al. for platform typologies	Han Woo Park & Mike Thelwall (webometrics)
Type	Structural analysis of relationships among social-media actors	Network analysis of hyperlinks among websites as social and communicative ties
Seminal source	Himelboim, I., Smith, M. A., Rainie, L., Shneiderman, B., & Espina, C. (2017). Classifying Twitter topic-networks using social network analysis. Social Media + Society, 3(1), 1–13.	Park, H. W., & Thelwall, M. (2006). Hyperlink analyses of the World Wide Web: A review. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 8(4).
Aliases	Social media SNA, Online interaction network analysis, Platform conversation network analysis, Sosyal Medya Ağ Analizi	HNA, Webometric hyperlink analysis, Web hyperlink network analysis, Köprü Bağlantı Ağı Analizi
Related	4	4
Summary	Social media network analysis applies social-network methods to the relationships among accounts on platforms — who follows, mentions, replies to, retweets, or shares whom — to reveal the structure of online conversation. By representing interactions as a graph and computing measures of centrality and community, it identifies influential actors, cohesive clusters, and the overall shape of public discourse around a topic.	Hyperlink network analysis (HNA) treats the hyperlinks among websites as social and communicative ties and applies social-network methods to the resulting web graph. Developed within webometrics by Park, Thelwall, and others, it reads a link from one organization's site to another's as a signal of endorsement, affiliation, or attention, and maps how actors — governments, NGOs, companies, media — are connected online.