Introduction
The human life and specifically social life has become online. Which means that internet has become ever pervasive and our lives are continually shifting to the cyber world. The social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have grown into behemoths and have provided the hitherto silent proletariat a new media to voice their opinion, make friends, share their achievements and moments of glory, get in touch with old friends, etc. Indians are not behind the world in any sense in the internet revolution, rather the average Indian netizen is younger and more active on social networks than others around the world.[1]
With this social network revolution, businesses across the world have tried to leverage the wealth of knowledge on the internet and social networks to better understand their customers and prospects. Analytics and specifically social network analysis (SNA) is a creation of this need of the businesses. Through SNA the businesses try to understand the consumer behaviour and use it extensively in their Segmentation, Targetting and Positioning (STP) strategy.
Objective
This study tries to find out some of the tools available online for free to analyse social networks and more specifically Facebook, and to demonstrate the visualisations and analyses possible through such tools.
Methodology
The tools used in the study are Gephi, myFnetwork app on Facebook and Challenger Network Graphs app on Facebook. These tools have been uploaded and run with the Facebook data. The latter two apps can be found directly on Facebook and can be run from one's Facebook account itself to visualize the Facebook network. Gephi is a third party application which can be found on the internet for free and can be installed on the computer. It needs a .gdf file with the Facebook data on it to run. The .gdf file can be obtained through the myFNetwork app and can be used to run on Gephi.
My personal Facebook data was used in all the three applications and the output was obtained as a network.
Results and Discussion
The resulting outputs of the myFnetwork app were:
The outputs from Challenger Network Graphs app were:
Below is the total network of my Facebook friends based on their friendship with each other. The edges show the friendships between two people and the nodes are individual friends.
Graph showing relations by locations:
Hierarchical map view of Musicians graph:
Map view of books graph:
TV shows graph:
Movies graph:
First level neighbours of movie '3 Idiots':
Members of a cluster by location:
Most important nodes:
The Gephi output is as follows:
Directed graph
No. of Nodes: 371
No. of Edges: 4877
My Network
Conclusion
The above tools can be used to visualise any relational database. The network and clusters inform us about the relationships between individuals, individuals and companies, etc. These relations and underlying data can be analysed to arrive at conclusions about the suitable choice of media to target a specific target segment, the kind of channel to follow, the target segment or individuals who can act as influencers, the language, tone and visual of the message, etc. These relations also inform us about the current trends and the habits of different individuals in a cluster. We can analyse the clusters to draw a wealth of consumer information which would be beneficial to us in our business.
No comments:
Post a Comment