Understanding Microblog Users for Social Recommendation Based on Social Networks Analysis

I-Hsing Ting (National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan)

Pei Shan Chang (National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan)

Shyue-Liang Wang (National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan)

Abstract: With the rapid growth of Internet and social networking websites, various services are provided in these platforms. For instance, Facebook focuses on social activities, Twitter and Plurk (which are called microblogs) are both focusing on the interaction of users through short messages. Millions of users enjoy services from these websites which are full of marketing possibilities. Understanding the users can assist companies to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of the target market. In this paper, a social recommendation system based on the data from microblogs is proposed. This social recommendation system is built according to the messages and social structure of target users. The similarity of the discovered features of users and products will then be calculated as the essence of the recommendation engine. A case study included in the paper presents how the recommendation system works based on real data from Plurk.

Keywords: microblogs, social networks analysis, social recommendation system, target marketing

Categories: H.3.5