Software program detects true "best friends" on social media

The program was developed by Universidad Nacional de Colombia (UNal) in Medellín Ph.D. in IT Engineering Francisco Javier Moreno and UNal IT Engineer and Mathematician Santiago Hernández.

As opposed to what generally occurs, the innovation of this program does not determine the best friend or customer as he who has the most contacts, but assesses the quality of the connections.

In other words, the best client is one which has numerous friends that will most probably also follow the company. For instance, comparing a user with 1,000 contacts and 100 interested in the firm and another user with 300 contacts but 150 follow the company; the latter has more potential.

For the software to take this decision, the creators used a mathematical metric known as PageRank, which originally helps qualify the status of a web page.

With the purpose of determining the best current friends, through simulation, contacts are eliminated from social media and the more amount of points lost on PageRank, the customer is more valuable; in other words, this contact should not be lost because on the contrary the status on social media could be lost.

To determine the best potential friend they follow a similar dynamic. Again by simulation, the program adds people who are not following the company. If the PageRank increases, this is a potential friend, a customer who is necessary to pursue and persuade with the goal of improving the status on social media.

The research project entitled, "An algorithm to determine the current best friends on social media" was presented during the second edition of the 2015 Engineering and Research Journal.

A topic to probe

This software program applied to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, opens a field of research which can help a company to profile its customers, focus its marketing campaigns and measure satisfaction levels.

The research potential of this is enormous. For instance, the researchers use PageRank to determine the ranking. However, there are other metrics which can assist in determining the ranking considering personal preferences such as music, movies or literature.

Therefore for the future it would be interesting to develop a research project which examines all or some of the variables, said the researchers while emphasizing the increasing importance of social media on the economy and daily lives.