Social Media Mining: Finding Opinion Leaders in Micro-blogging

Mgr. Hung Minh Nguyen

Master's thesis

Abstract:

Online marketing on social media is getting remarkable interest from companies, organizations and even individuals. And electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) is one of the most effective means for online marketing. In WOM marketing, there are opinion leaders who are able to influence other people’s behavior, opinions in terms of information or product adoption. Opinion leaders are educated and they actively share knowledge to their community; they have high social status and have better access to information. Thus, they usually play an intermediate role between the source of information and majority of people in community. Our study proposes a model using data mining for identifying opinion leaders of a topic on Twitter, the biggest micro-blogging service today. Our experiments show that this model can be potentially used for any topic on Twitter. Therefore, customers can take advantage of our solution to find potential opinion leaders on a specific topic the customers are concerned about. The information of/from opinion leaders may be useful for the customers within a marketing strategy towards business improvement.

Keywords

Social media, Data mining, Twitter, WOM, Opinion leader, Marketing, Microblog

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 30. 5. 2016

Thesis defence

• Date of defence: 28. 6. 2016
• Supervisor: PhD Bruno Rossi
• Reader: RNDr. Radek Ošlejšek, Ph.D.

Masaryk University

Faculty of Informatics

Master programme / field:
Applied Informatics / Service Science, Management and Engineering (eng.)