Social Network Analysis: An example using GEJ and Buhari twitter war.

I am learning something new, and not just for fun, there is a client still waiting for my business proposal and sample job on Social Influence Analysis and Brand Optimization. I will be pulling social media messages and interactions about the client from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest to show how really influential the client is online, what people associate with the brand, who are the brand's most fervent evangelists, show network graphs that make all these information more easy to understand and give recommendations of how the client can reach a new market or be associated with the right things. I will also be doing a sentiment analysis that show how people react to the client's weekly events and the brand as a whole.

The client is heavily active in the digital business world and wants to have a holistic view of all its digital activities and a detailed influence analysis. The aim is to help the client have a standard feedback system that is both reliable and globally wide showing what it is doing right, documenting the results of every online initiative it embarks on and forming a business report that will guide the business strategy.

Weekly, I will be making a dashboard report of the online influence, new market reach, interesting patterns, top terms associated with the brand, new fans, comments cloud, business requests and a comparison with the previous week. Then monthly I will give a detailed research report with insights and recommendation that will help guide the client's new month strategy.

So to our example. As this Saturday is Presidential Election day, I decided to pull a network graph of Twitter interactions about Buhari and Jonathan (GEJ). Below is an interesting output.

For Buhari, in the last few hours the people talking about him are shown below and one particular guy was at the center of most of the twitter activities.

The Twitter Buzz Around Buhari by users identified by their profile pictures

The guy at the center of it all, @prodigy2639

And for Goodluck Ebele Jonathan in the last few hours.

The Twitter Buzz Around GEJ by users identified by their profile pictures

The guy at the center of it all, @peaceofnigeria

And that's a tiny glimpse of what insights Social Network Analsyis can show about important events/brands. I could go ahead to segment Nigerian twitter users by their candidate sentiment: those fully in support of GEJ, those fully in support of Buhari, those who are indifferent and those wanting a gentle push to tip to either side. Then I could show them by current location and twitter influence. I could also show the average daily number pro GEJ tweets versus average daily number pro Buhari tweets.

Then I can give predictions and recommendations, stating my assumptions. All data backed and verifiable.