<![CDATA[The rapid growth of big data has transformed social media into a major source of communication data and research. This study aims to map publication trends, identify the most influential publications, and examine the major research themes in social media communication and big data research. A descriptive quantitative method with a bibliometric approach was employed. Data were retrieved from Google Scholar using Publish or Perish, with an initial retrieval of 1,000 documents. After metadata validation and screening in Mendeley Desktop, 156 publications from 2019 to 2023 were included for analysis. Bibliometric mapping was performed using VOSviewer. The findings indicate a consistent increase in publications, peaking at 53 (34%) in 2023. Citation analysis identified the ten most influential publications, with the highest-cited article receiving 15 citations. Keyword co-occurrence analysis revealed four major thematic clusters. At the same time, “social media” emerged as the dominant keyword with 82 occurrences and a total link strength of 91, followed by “big data” (34 occurrences) and “communication” (34 occurrences). The visualisation also highlights the growing prominence of themes such as sentiment analysis, Twitter, digital communication, Industry 4.0, and artificial intelligence. These findings demonstrate that research on social media communication and big data has expanded substantially and provide a comprehensive overview of the intellectual structure and emerging research directions in this field.]]>
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