Capstone Projects

Optimizing Advertising Campaigns Using Social Network Analysis

Program: Data Science Master's
Location: Not Specified (remote)
Student: Matthew Peterson

This case study conducted an exploratory analysis of Twitter feeds to gain a better understanding of content, timing, and strongest influencers to leverage in social media for a
client advertising campaign. This hypothetical client represented a tech startup that develops virtual reality (VR) applications and intended to optimize the results of advertising their work
via the Twitter social network. First, a social network analysis was conducted to better understand the flow of information surrounding any posts that involved VR. This was used to
determine the most influential Twitter users that could be leveraged to optimize the dispersion of their product promotions. This list of influential users along with the users of well-known competitor companies developing similar VR applications was then used to gather timelines of the tweets they have posted. Finally, exploratory statistical analysis was used to determine whether the client or influencers should create their promotional posts, and to reveal temporal and content-based aspects of tweets that appear highly correlated with successful dispersion using high retweet counts as the response variable.