Digital Assignment

Course: Social and Information Networks CSE3021

Submitted By:
Parijat Niyogy 19BCE0696
Part A

1. Pseudo-social networks for direct

marketing
Given the popularity of social media, social network marketing is a broad category of marketing.
Anytime a business uses social media, it could be considered a form of social network marketing.
This form of outreach could take place on any social media platform, whether it's Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube, or anything else.

Social network marketing is also varied due to the varied nature of marketing. Marketing outreach
can take many different shapes—from outright advertisements to more subtle ways of building a
relationship with potential customers. Social network marketing can similarly be straightforward
ads for products or services, or it can be a means for a business to develop relationships.

Pros Explained

​ Cheap: Compared to other forms of marketing, social media is very inexpensive. It is free to
create accounts and post on most (if not all) platforms. Those free posts have the potential to
reach an audience that will (hopefully) share the message with other members of the social
media community. There are also various paid advertising options to ensure that your
message will reach an audience. Facebook, for example, offers comprehensive options for ad
targeting, such as the ability to target members that reside within a specific geographic
radius.
​ Direct engagement with customers: Social networks allow the business to engage the target
audience and develop interactive relationships with customers. Instead of putting out a
message and hoping an audience sees it, you can engage directly with people—commenting
on their posts and starting conversations.
​ Able to learn more about customers: As you communicate and engage with customers,
you'll learn more about your customer base. Many people put personal details on their social
media profiles, including information like tastes and preferences that are relevant to
businesses.
Cons Explained

​ Time-intensive: The main problem with social network marketing from a business
perspective is that it can be incredibly time-consuming. Social media marketing campaigns
are not one-shot affairs; they need to be nurtured over time. While big businesses have been
using this type of marketing effectively, they have the resources to task large numbers of staff
with managing social media marketing campaigns. Many small businesses lack these
resources.
​ Direct advertising is less effective: Businesses using social networks obviously want to sell
their products or services. However, blatant advertising is fairly easy to spot on social media.
Overt attempts to make a sale won't be as effective as more subtle forms of promotion on
social media. To use social network marketing effectively, businesses have to be perceived as
members of the social media community. Original content and audience engagement could
help to this end.
​ Increases risk of public criticism and hacks: Given the community nature of social media,
businesses must be aware of the PR risks. A public social media page can face an onslaught
of negative postings by customers, ex-employees, or competitors (whether true or false).
Hackers could target your page to spread misinformation or sow chaos. Either situation can
make it difficult to manage your company's reputation. Even a harmless posting can turn
into a public relations disaster. For example, in 2012, McDonald's tried to engage with the
social media community by posting a tweet under the hashtag "#McDStories"; customers
responded by posting horror stories of poor McDonald's experiences with the same hashtag,
drowning out the original marketing content with negative publicity.

2. Linking healthcare service providers to

uncover hidden costs
The healthcare industry is rapidly evolving with an incredible speed and the major contributors to
this change are the dramatic upsurge in healthcare communication brought about by social media. It
offers an opportunity of communicating with consumers quickly and inexpensively by helping in
promoting new wellness programs, marketing new services and announcing the latest developments
in patient care. An interesting project undertaken to improve social media in health care is
“Healthcare Hash-tag Project” which has made Twitter more accessible for the healthcare
community as a whole by searching and capturing hash-tags related to healthcare. Social media
helps patients become more aware about the various health options available thereby taking more
control of their health. Very soon companies may have to embrace social media in a better way not
by just giving away information but by improving their ability to listen to patients' needs. It helps
patients in self-diagnosis and in some cases visiting the doctor is curtailed.

Let’s look at some statistics about social media in health care:

1. 90 % of respondents between the ages of 18–24 said they would trust medical information
shared by others on their social media sites.
2. 31 % of healthcare firms have specific social media guidelines in written form.
3. 19 % of Smartphone owners have at least one health app phone with the most popular being
Exercise and diet apps.
4. 41 % of the people said social media would affect their choice of a specific doctor or hospital.
5. Parents are more likely to seek medical advice from social media.

These statistics show us how important social media is gaining importance in healthcare. Once a
hospital enters into social media for promotion it cannot back off as inactive hospitals online spread
a negative awareness among people.

Analysing social media tends to have a myriad amount of advantages for a firm. Reviews shared
online tend to be honest and by monitoring mentions of corporate and brand names, analysts can
learn what people really think about a firm. It becomes relatively easy to make improvements when
you clearly know how people feel about a particular product or service. Analytical tools help to
identify the target audience more easily.

3. A transportation network for urban

planning
Location-based social network data offers the promise of collecting the data from a large base of
users over a longer span of time at negligible cost. While several studies have applied social network
data to activity and mobility analysis, a comparison with travel diaries and general statistics has been
lacking. In this paper, we analysed geo-referenced Twitter activities from a large number of users in
Singapore and neighbouring countries. By combining this data, population statistics and travel
diaries and applying clustering techniques, we addressed detection of activity locations, as well as
spatial separation and transitions between these locations. Kernel density estimation performs best
to detect activity locations due to the scattered nature of the twitter data; more activity locations are
detected per user than reported in the travel survey. The descriptive analysis shows that determining
home locations is more difficult than detecting work locations for most planning zones. Spatial
separations between detected activity locations from Twitter data - as reported in a travel survey and
captured by public transport smart card data - are mostly similarly distributed, but also show
relevant differences for very short and very long distances. This also holds for the transitions
between zones. Whether the differences between Twitter data and other data sources stem from
differences in the population sub-sample, clustering methodology, or whether social networks are
being used significantly more at specific locations must be determined by further research. Despite
these shortcomings, location-based social network data offers a promising data source for insights
into activity locations and mobility patterns, especially for regions where travel survey data is not
readily available.

4. Social Network Analysis for creating

usable customer intelligence
Organisations generally want to use the social media data to understand the behaviour and needs of
their customers or specific targeted groups of people with respect to the organisation’s current or
future services or products. Suggested three major approaches to observing social media – tools for
channel reporting, overview score-card systems, and predictive analytic techniques. It also discussed
the fourth approach i.e., using a predictive analytic platform that combines both text mining and
network analysis with other predictive methods such as clustering to overcome the limitations of the
previous techniques and generate new fact based insight. The combination of network mining and
text mining reveals new assorted insights into customer behaviour in social media which wouldn’t
have been otherwise possible by using any one of these techniques alone. Combining reference
structures with sentiment analysis from online forum posts from the network allowed the study to
position positive and negative users in relevance to their relative weights as followers and
influencers in the underlying discussion forum. A good understanding of the segments of social
media can make a valuable contribution to the decision about how to shape and invest in the
organisation’s social media and marketing plans.

5. Social Network Analysis in HR

Management
Social media as a digital platform has had a tremendous impact on how we communicate and
maintain dialogue with friends, family and colleagues. The advent of social media sites like
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others have presented to us a democratic platform where everyone
has an opinion and an equal chance of being heard. Social media, in the way it is structured, allows
people to share their life events, their opinions on matters of political or social significance and their
feelings. The hallmark of this medium is in the two-way, instant communication that it offers
vis-à-vis other traditional media channels like television print, where the communication is only
one-way.

Because of these very benefits of the digital platform, it has become a rudimentary practice for every
organisation to have a social media presence for marketing or for corporate HR engagement. In any
organisation, HR is the function that deals with all the employees related matters like payroll,
recruitments, employee engagement, learning and skill development, work environment etc. It is
also the responsibility of the HR function to communicate and generate conversations about various
HR practices such as talent acquisition, leadership, employee communication as well as attracting
future employees. Social Media as a tool helps them do just that.

Through social media, conversations have changed both internally and externally in organisations.
There is a need to create an engaging two-way dialogue between the company and the employees.
HR uses social media to create this dialogue. As we are aware, the main task of any HR personnel
goes beyond filling up excel sheets with employee details. Their main job lies with knowing the
pulse of the employees – what works for them, what doesn’t? With this tool, all the employees can
engage, collaborate and react in a public forum in the presence of HR. These online conversations
around an organisation are very critical for building a company’s image as an employer of choice.
This makes social media an apt tool for corporate branding and engagement.

Another critical aspect of an HR personnel’s life is their visibility in the organisation. If the HR are
not visible, then they are not involved with the employees. They do not have the employee related
insights needed to take important HR decisions. Social media provides HR an opportunity to create a
relationship with every employee in the organisation, irrespective of their location. As employees
become aware that there is a window where they can go for a resolution to any issue, the visibility
and credibility of HR as a function increases. It is also a great platform to get a general feel of how
an organisation is perceived by its employees and potential recruits.

Recruitment is one of the most sought-after areas of HR on social media platforms. These platforms
have accelerated the speed of the recruitment process which involves steps like posting a job, getting
resumes, taking interviews, making offers and so on.

In addition to that, social media can also be used for taking 360-degree feedback from employees. It
can drive collaboration between different stakeholders of the company and the employees. It can also
aid learning and development through real-time, on-the-go access to training.

While the benefits of social media to HR are many, the implementation of social media in the
functioning of HR is not an easy task. This is so because any employee engagement requires the
involvement of all other business and support functions. It also requires HR to be adept with
handling digital media skills and competencies.

HR needs to develop the right mix of tools for its social media presence. Having a page on key social
media portals is not enough. With the right mix, they will be able to engage with the right audience
at the right time. Some channels will target external audiences while others will target internal
employees. The purpose of some interactions might be corporate brand building and talent
acquisition, while for other channels, the purpose could be dissemination of valuable information
regarding employee benefits. Hence, knowledge and skill are important aspects while developing the
HR strategy on social media. The right strategy also takes into account different facets of social
media campaign execution such as deciding the media mix, content type, channels, target audience
and tools.

Social media also allows for an informal way of interaction compared to official meetings and emails.
HR emails often get lost in the barrage of emails employees receive every day. On a social network, it
is easier to stay abreast with topics that an employee may follow. HR may make employees follow
relevant topics and pages related to the organisation on social media to ensure no one misses out.

HR personnel need to ensure administration of social media forums as well. As employees interact
outside of their offices about their organisation, a social media policy needs to be set in place and
employees need to be educated on it.
As social media is a vivid and highly interactive platform, the onus of engagement lies with
employees to act as influencers and make it count. While it is easy to get oneself engrossed in the
daily chores at work, it is helpful to follow and learn from the leading industry thought leaders who
are making a profound difference in their respective fields by voicing their thoughts through their
blogs, pages and articles.

Part B
import tweepy

# fill your personal keys

consumer_key = ""
consumer_secret = ""
access_token = ""
access_token_secret = ""

# authorization of consumer key and consumer secret

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)

# set access to user's access key and access secret

auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)

# calling the api

api = tweepy.API(auth)

# printing the followers

for follower in api.get_followers(screen_name = "AbhirupDatta3"):
print(follower.screen_name)