Abstract
Social media analytics uses data mining tools, platforms, and analytics techniques to collect and
analyse infinite amounts of social media data. Social media analytics tools extract patterns and
connections from data, for insight into market sentiments and requirements, to enhance business
intelligence. ‘Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel Pro’ (NodeXL Pro) is a social media
analytics tool that simplifies basic network analysis tasks and supports the analysis of social media
networks. NodeXL Pro does sophisticated ‘crawling’ (extracting data) across a range of social media
platforms. Through a qualitative case study design, this study explores and describes the use of NodeXL
Pro through empirical and multimodal analysis and social network visualisation of social media data of the
Liberty Holdings Ltd data breach crisis case in June 2018. The hashtag ‘#Liberty breach’ resulted in 10 000
data sources (‘tweets’) from the social media platform Twitter. This study is unique on two levels. Firstly,
it appears to be the first study in the South African marketing literature to use NodeXL Pro in social media
analytics. Secondly, it presents the case study as a usage case to describe, in a step‐by‐step way, the
functionalities of NodeXL Pro through social network analysis. The main finding of the paper focuses on the
usability and manifold features (including the integrated visualisation tool) of NodeXL Pro. This social
media analytics tool can open doors for marketing scholars and practitioners alike to measure, map, and
model collections of connections.