nodeXL is a feasible tool to get a first impression on a small dataset.

This link may help you:

http://www.activatenetworks.net/social-network-analysis-sna-software-review/

However, from my point of view, there are more sophisticated tools:

http://sna.stanford.edu/rlabs.php

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/igraph/igraph.pdf

https://www.p2p.tu-darmstadt.de/research/gtna-graph-theoretic-network-analyzer/

Which tool is good or "the best" is strongly depending on your exact purpose. However, you did neither specify your purpose nor describe your datasets (e.g. size).

Cheers

Thomas

There are many tools for monitoring social media. One of this is Brand24. Look at link

I think Thomas' advice is good.  I use both NodeXL and Gephi.  Partly this is because NodeXL reads certain kinds of data more easily, like data in matrix form, and Gephi reads list data.  Gephi's output can be more aesthetically pleasing, but then again some times too much.  Sometime the very straight-forward look and approach of NodeXL just works better.  

Hi Mudasir!

  I agree with the perspectives exposed by John and Thomas.  Since you know what you want from your data you could choose easier the SNA Tool. On my studies I have used bolth (Gephi and NodeXL) because I needed a metric that came from NodeXL and used graphs generated by Gephi.

Actually i use UCINET for social networks analysis

I found this thread very helpful as it added to my awareness of the NodeXL package. Be careful using ready made templates and always know what options and choices you are making. For example NodeXL does not take graph direction (link FROM TO) into account when it calculates geodesic distance. One example -- the attached diagram clearly has a diameter of 7 by inspection. NodeXL returns 5. This is a known issue on their comments. Also, be careful with distances from a node to itself (normally zero, right?) so that the denominator for the average geodesic distance should be (n (n -1)), not n^2

I am using UCInet, and so far this software was good to provide SNA for my research.

Dears,

I tried to use NodeXL BAsic but it was hard to figure out the functionalities, so I am going to buy NodeXLPro, does it worth? 39$ student account. I do not have coding skills, plan to have python classes soon. are there any free tools for social media research, for retrieving data by hashtags and keywords from Twitter?

many thanks for any advice and help.