The increasing amount of user-generated content available on social media platforms requires new methods to find, evaluate, and to compare. To this day, existing ranking approaches to user-generated content do not allow for evaluation across platforms by exploiting its metadata. User-generated content, such as blog postings, forum discussions, shared videos etc. does however contain information that can be used for its evaluation independent of specific search interests. Claudia Wyrwoll presents a query- and language-independent ranking approach that allows for global evaluation of user-generated content across different platforms. Building on an insightful introduction into social media fundamentals, she proposes new models describing phenomena associated with social media, laying the foundation for further research and development.  Contents Terminology, Models, and Metadata Query-Independent Ranking Across Social Media Platforms Search and Discovery for Social Media  Target Groups Researchers and students from the fields of social media research and information retrieval Practitioners from the fields of search engineering, social media monitoring and management  About the Author Claudia Wyrwoll earned her doctorate degree at the faculty of Mathematics, Informatics und Natural Sciences, University of Hamburg, where she gave lectures and seminars on theories and models of social media. Before starting her research, she gathered professional experience working in the advertising industry. She works as consultant.  .