The rise of user profiling in social media: review, challenges and future direction

Social media have become very popular as the number of users, organizations and research associated continue to increase rapidly. As such, user profiling becomes prominent as it enables the extraction of information and knowledge pertaining to users from their profiles. There is a growing number of current literatures related to social media and user profiling, but none that demonstrates both as a general entity or overview. Hence a distinctive representation of related attributes will enhance understanding and knowledge in this field. In this paper, bibliometric analysis was conducted to review social media profiling trends across Scopus-indexed publications from 2012 to 2022. The study analyzed distribution of keywords and VOS viewer software was used for data visualization. The findings and analysis lead to the development of a taxonomy to classify social media user profiling through several attributes—data source, trends, applications, techniques and current approaches. Moreover, the paper discusses key challenges of profiling in social media and future directions.