Social Media Data and Users' Preferences: A Statistical Analysis to Support Marketing Communication

Differently from traditional transaction data, social media data are difficult to investigate due to their volume, variety and velocity. Indeed, the knowledge extraction from social media data raises several issues especially for what concerns statistical exploration and synthesis of complex information. Our work aims to study users' preferences, stated on a social media platform, in order to aid businesses to make their marketing communication decisions. We rely our analysis upon 5685 Italian Facebook users interested in pharmaceutical products and health. The data have been collected at the end of 2014 and are focused on Likes actively expressed by the subjects on specific categories of interests (TV Channels and Magazines). Through a factorial analysis we uncovered significant associations between marketing communication Media and users' profiles. This allows sketching out a marketing strategy in twofold actions: first, identifying the target group to reach and, then, the nearest suitable channel where to develop the marketing communication.