NodeXL Academy: Social Media Network Analysis Short Course (Live Session)

On Tuesday, October 6, 2026, from 3:00 to 6:00 PM BST, NodeXL Academy is running a live 3-hour evening short course in social media network analysis. In a single focused session, you go from raw social media data to a network map that shows who drives a conversation, which communities are inside it, and how a message moves. Everything runs inside Microsoft Excel. No programming.

What the session covers

Social network analysis looks at relationships instead of totals. Not how many followers an account has, but who replies to whom, which accounts bridge otherwise separate communities, and how information actually spreads. Over the course of the evening you will learn to:

• Collect real data from sources such as X, Reddit, YouTube, and Wikipedia.
• Calculate the network metrics that identify influential accounts, including degree, betweenness, closeness, and PageRank.
• Detect the communities inside a network using NodeXL‘s clustering.
• Analyze content with sentiment analysis and the most frequent words, hashtags, and links.
• Lay out and publish a clean network map you can share.

NodeXL runs as an add-in to Excel and requires no coding.

New this year: the X (Apify) importer, and AI

Some of the data researchers most want feels out of reach, locked inside a platform with no easy way out. This year the course covers NodeXL Pro’s new X (Apify) importer (introduced in NodeXL Pro v.565), which lets you collect X data by hashtag, keyword, or user timeline with one click, paying only for what you collect. You will also get a clear picture of how AI is reshaping social media research.

Your instructors

Dr. Marc Smith is a sociologist and director of the Social Media Research Foundation.
Dr. Verónica Espinoza is a data scientist, neurobiologist, chemist, consultant, trainer and speaker, and one of NodeXL’s leading educators, in English and Spanish.
Dr. Wasim Ahmed is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Hull, a Research Fellow in Social Network Science and Digital Disinformation at the United Nations University, and Associate Editor of JMIR Infodemiology.

Who it is for

Researchers and graduate students, marketers and communications professionals, journalists, and anyone who works with people, conversations, or connections and wants a practical way to see the structure inside them.