Using social media as a basis for marketing initiatives

Abstract

In computing, social media is represented as a mathematical graph which depicts users as nodes, and interactions as edges. Users are either persons or company profiles - even a specific product. The edges convey feelings, likings and acceptance which are known to be very useful for businesses to understand better their product's perception by users and consequently influence the business's marketing tactics. Due to the remarkable popularity reached by social media platforms, the data available is so vast that many marketing experts cannot ascribe significant meaning when looking at it as it is. The purpose of this project is to tap into this data from two popular social media platforms, and transform and process it in a way to enable deeper knowledge extraction that is usable in a marketing initiative. The final artefact of this project acquires data from the two platforms by connecting, and sending requests to their APIs. These requests return responses consisting of data available with regards to that particular request. This data is then processed to create one consolidated model encompassing the data acquired from both sources. This is then stored in a graph based data model which is queried as required. The data returned by the APIs highly depends on the social media platform itself as they have included further privacy concerns in their latest APIs which limits the data in the response. This artefact works with the given public data, however if users give permission to use their data in the application, it would be able to give more insightful information. The end result of this artefact consists of a number of charts which portray significant information that help business users to understand their fans and hence improve their marketing campaign.