Social media target marketing: Use of social networks data to target marketing

Social networks provide marketing managers and businesses with opportunity to target their customers. By understanding the demographics of users, marketing managers can offer suitable products and services. Although direct questioning can be drawn upon to solicit users’ demographics such as age, some customers due to privacy concerns do not like to reveal their personal information and, it cannot come in handy for potential customer identification. The huge amount of data social networks generate can solve this problem. Previous studies in the prediction of demographic characteristics suffer some limitations because they were mainly text based and hence, language-bound. This study investigates how some interactive data can predict users’ age. Further, it examines if classification methods can be used for age prediction. The results revealed that the number of friends, number of opposite sex friends, number of comments received, and number of photos which users share can predict users’ age. Also, a linear relationship between interactive data and users’ age was found.