Social Networking Influence and Popularity Index Analysis as an Online Marketing Tool

In this paper, an analysis is performed on data which consists of influence and
popularity indices of social networking sites. The analysis aims in extracting and
potentially exploiting the identified patterns’ properties in Sales Strategy and
Marketing. The aforementioned indices refer separately to blogs, microblogging sites,
social bookmarking pages as well as a mixture of 80+ social networking sites including
Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc. extracted by the
SocialMention online tool. Within this context, a case study of Toyota brand name
investigation is presented. Specifically, the SocialMention indices have been extracted
for a specified time window corresponding to the user generated content of the
previously mentioned social networking sites that includes the key word of the famous
car manufacturer. Within this perspective, the datasets are explored by applying
Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) combined with Hierarchical Clustering (HC)
and the results are used to evaluate the effectiveness of social networking sites use
as a contemporary marketing tool.