Problem

Startup Market Exploration. Social media has given a boost to the artisan and craft trades. Many people embrace pastimes such as beer brewing, bread making, and pottery making. Social media provides both a mechanism for a diaspora community to form online, and a medium for instructions and advice to spread quickly. It also provides a vehicle for new ideas, products, and services to go viral. This has opened up opportunities for entrepreneurs and established companies to provide equipment and supplies to the artisanal community and become small-medium scale producers themselves. Before the advent of social media, the high cost of advertising and marketing confined most artisans to the ranks of dedicated hobbyists. Now the availability of social media as a marketing tool brings commercialization and expansion within reach of hundreds of thousands of would-be entrepreneurs, and their financial backers. And because social media has become the communication vehicle of choice for many in the artisan community, it is an important channel for established supply companies whose marketing budgets are not similarly constrained. In the following problems, use social network graph visualizations and metrics along with inspection of the data, to learn something about the network. This is an exploratory task, with no correct or incorrect answers.

a. Use R's face-book package to import data from a Facebook page on a topic of your choice.

• Get the 50 most recent posts by setting n = 50. Collect the list of commenters on these 50 posts.

• Now collect 50 more posts from the same Facebook page, this time from exactly 1 year ago. Use arguments since and until. Collect the list of commenters on these 50 posts. otherwise, Facebook will require you to wait 1 hour until you can again download data.

i. Who are the influential users in each of the two samples? Report the metrics you used.

ii. Compare the list of influential users in the two samples to detect loyal users.

iii. Select the three most influential commenters in each sample and collect information on these users (using function get Users).

iv. Can you discern and describe marketing campaigns based on this analysis?

b. Explore whether similar explorations are useful for other products and services that you are familiar with, such as consulting, software, and mobile apps.