Qualitative Analysis of Commercial Social Network Profiles

Social-networking sites have become an integral part of many users’ daily internet routine. Commercial enterprises have been quick to recognize this and are subsequently creating profiles for many of their products and services. Commercial enterprises use social network profiles to target and interact with potential customers as well as to provide a gateway for users of the product or service to interact with each other. Many commercial enterprises use the statistics from their product or service’s social network profile to tout the popularity and success of the product or service being showcased. They will use statistics such as number of friends, number of daily visits, number of interactions, and other similar measurements to quantify their claims. These statistics are often not a clear indication of the true popularity and success of the product. In this chapter the term product is used to refer to any tangible or intangible product, service, celebrity, personality, film, book, or other entity produced by a commercial enterprise. Social network profiles are complex entities that require one to use heuristics in addition to traditional statistics in order to assess the success and popularity of the product showcased in the profile. For example, a product’s profile may have one million friends; using only quantitative analysis, this would lead one to believe that the product showcased has achieved a great deal of success. Using heuristic techniques one can sift through subsets of the profile’s friend list and take into account things such as, the number of friends that are not other commercial profiles which interact at least bi-weekly with the profile being analyzed. This will yield a new measurement that may be orders of magnitude lower than the initial one million friends claimed. Thus, showing the success of the product was not as