Marketing and social network dataming

Almost everyone has Facebook, twitter or other account in social networks. People share photos, share pages or talk about something. ALL of this activities could expose their ideas on some products. As I talked about in last blog, companies could find value customer through way. In this blog, I will talked more about this. 

Traditionally, companies get customer profile from their customer databases, and usually, this database could only have customer's basic information. Only when one customer buys a lot things from them, they could obtain accurate profile of customer. 

Now the social networks allow people to share their idea and expose themselves, it provides  more opportunities for companies to analysis their customer or potential customer. For example, by social network mining, some new trend could be predict. The figure below show a research result for Harvard University. 

Application Example 

One application of this is for financial institutes, such as banks and credit card companies. 

This companies need changes in people financial states, based on people's changes, they could offer some promotions or avoid risk. Their are some instances. 

First, when someone update status in Facebook from "in a relationship" to "engage" or "married", banks could give this new couple some promotion of opening couple account or credit card promotions. They could also contact them, such as send mail to them, to introduce real estate loan. 

Second, when credit card companies find their customer is laid off which got from his/her twitter or Facebook, which means he/she would has less money in a period in the future, the credit card company may increase APR or reduce credit limit or pay special attention to this guys. Also, his friend in a same department should be pay attention too. 

Problems

The biggest problem matching their customer between social networks and their own customer database. 

First, if a company has a customer's email, it is easy to find customer on social network. Because Facebook or other SSN website could search people based on their email address, and the email address is the index of database. 

The other case is bad, if no customer identity information is available, then matching technologies  are demanded. The matching method is very sophisticate, and the investment of matching is huge. In this case, decision maker need a trade off. 

As a summary,social networks provide a new source of intelligence for marketing. Mining is necessary, and could increase income and know customers better. 

ref: http://www.digitaltonto.com/2011/3-ways-to-use-social-network-analysis-for-marketing/

      http://mashable.com/2011/02/25/data-mining-social-marketing/

      http://thefinancialbrand.com/20160/analyzing-social-media-networks-for-financial-marketing/