NodeXL Academy: Social Media Network Analysis Short Course (Two Live Afternoon Sessions)

On Tuesday and Wednesday, December 8 to 9, 2026, from 3:00 to 6:00 PM GMT each evening, NodeXL Academy is running a short course in social media network analysis across two 3-hour live evening sessions. It is the last NodeXL Academy short course of 2026. Across two hands-on evenings, you finish able to collect social media data, find the accounts that drive a conversation, and publish a map that makes its structure clear. Everything runs inside Microsoft Excel. No programming.

What the two evenings cover

Social network analysis looks at relationships instead of totals: who replies to whom, which accounts bridge otherwise separate communities, and how information spreads. Across the two evenings 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, shareable network map, and work through the full workflow on your own data.

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

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

This year the course covers NodeXL Pro’s new X (Apify) importer (introduced in NodeXL Pro v.565), which brings X data back within reach: collect 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. If you are returning after a while away, you will leave caught up on what has changed.

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 wants to go beyond the basics of network analysis and work on their own data.