Business history and social media: A concise review

ABSTRACT In this short essay, we draw on recent studies in history, communication, information science, and social sciences to offer a concise review of the history of social media both as a business model and as a distinctive academic data source. We start with an overview of the development of social media platforms in the past several decades and then move into a brief survey of the state of the field, examining how business, economic, and management historians engage with social media. Next, we introduce several commonly adopted analytical approaches and computational tools for processing historical social media data. Our final discussion addresses several key issues surrounding the analysis of historical social media data in business and economic history.