2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)
ANALYSIS OF THE BEHAVIOR OF
CUSTOMERS IN THE SOCIAL NETWORKS
USING DATA MINING TECHNIQUES
Leidys del Carmen Contreras Chinchilla
Department of Systems Engineering
Popular University of Cesar
Valledupar, Colombia
leidyscontreras@unicesar.edu.co
Abstract—Companies today are developing business
strategies taking into consideration behavior of their customers
through social networks, which have allowed to extract large
amounts of relevant data about users. This is why it has been
necessary to apply data mining techniques to find patterns that
describe the preferences of users in different contexts.
This paper describes the results of using data mining
techniques to analyze the behavior of customers of a fashion
company in Instagram social network. The methodology used
was CRISP-DM through which the descriptive models using the
techniques of clustering and association rules were evaluated.
The results shows that the proposed models can provide
useful information to designing marketing strategies appropriate
according to user preferences.
Keywords—Data mining; Social networks; marketing
strategies; customer behavior; clustering; k-means
1. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, companies try to build customer relationship
management systems (CRM: Customer Relationship
Management), based on social customer relationships and
patterns of behavior [1]. This is done in order to raise the level
of customer satisfaction, retain and achieve greater loyalty
through personalized service, adapting products and services of
the company to the user need.
Companies are learning how to understand their customers
in broader social context and in doing so generate a hypothesis:
The predictions of behavior of a customer in the future are
behaviors of other customers in the past. Behavior patterns of
individual customers used to build analytical user profiles.
According to this author, a company can target a specific
customer with a specific message when you have a profile; it is
a custom profile
IEEE/ACM ASONAM 2016, August 18-21, 2016, San
Francisco, CA, USA 978-1-5090-2846-7/16/$31.00 © 2016
IEEE
Kevin Andrey Rosales Ferreira
Department of Systems Engineering
Popular University of Cesar
Valledupar, Colombia
kandreyrosales@gmail.com
To promote products through various media companies
they are using available social networks, implementing
strategies B2C (Business-to-Consumer). These consisted of to
develop business strategies to get directly to the customer or
consumer. Different strategies are carried out by the Consumer
Marketer, the person who is applying various techniques and
strategies, supports the work of the sales team in marketing a
product or service [2]. At present companies are defining
strategies to achieve the highest level of customer loyalty and
satisfaction thereof, prior to the loyalty step, through an
individualized marketing (customized marketing),
conversational and personalized, with retention strategies
involving the customer in the business project, they increase
profitability and achieve customer loyalty. If companies do not
study the behavior of their customers through technology tools
such as social networks, using the techniques of data mining to
gain valuable knowledge of their customers, they are missing
an opportunity to be competitive powerfully and increase the
risk associated with decision making [3].
The data generated by social networks like Instagram
provide valuable information to many companies about the
behavior, tastes, preferences, and other characteristics of users,
which is the information that they need to develop their
marketing strategies. However, it is the transformation of data
into information and applying it to business, which will
generate value for the company [4].
The application of these techniques varies according to the
type of project to be undertaken, indicating that each mining
project will have certain characteristics that make different
techniques such as classification, clustering or decision trees
apply [5-6].
This paper presents a descriptive analysis of customer
behavior to a company in the fashion industry, according to the
impact on social networks, specifically in the Instagram social
network, in order to support the definition of marketing
strategies related with comments and likes of his followers in
their social network, so you can extract, analyze and provide
valuable knowledge about the behavior of the user.
 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)
3. METHODOLOGY
The methodology used for this project is called CRISP-DM
(Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining). The
CRISP-DM methodology is described in terms of a
hierarchical process model, consisting of a set of tasks that
describe four levels of abstraction: phase, generic task,
specialized task and process instance [7].
4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Once the CRISP-DM methodology was applied to data
from Instagram social network of the company, the following
results were obtained:
4.1 Understanding Business: Leading fashion company
nationwide that dresses prestigious figures from the
entertainment industry, TV actors, Showbiz presenters and
beauty queens. This company often shares images and videos
of their latest designs, accessories, events and trends in fashion
through social networks like Facebook and Instagram.
4.2 Understanding data: The information processed
corresponds to images or photos published by the company
under study in his Instagram account between August 2014 to
April 2015. These data were extracted using Instagram API via
Python with python-instagram library for developers
4.3 Preparation of data: The data set consists of 1,435
records and 8 attributes (Fecha_Creación, Link, tipo_media,
tipo_filtro, Likes, comentarios, like_usuario y tags).
4.4 Modeling: descriptive techniques used were
CLUSTERING model with the K-means algorithm and
ASSOCIATION RULES with FP-Growth and Create
association rules operator. These operators are available in the
RapidMiner software.
4.5 Evaluation models
4.5.1 Clustering: Once applied the model taking into
account various values of K, the number of clusters was plotted
with the mean square error generated by the model with the
same number of K. Analyzing the results, it shows that in the
SSE k = 5 is equal to 1,953 and from this value of k onwards
SSE variations are not very significant.
From the value of K = 5 was made an analysis of the
resulting clusters since there was no difference in mean values
of the centroid. The description of the results thrown by
software indicates that five clusters were found, which contain
information about the preferences of users who follow the
company under study. The Table 1 shows the resulting clusters.
TABLE 1
Resulting Clusters
ATRIBUTE C0 C1 C2 C3 C4
50-100
LIKES 200-250 50-100 50-100 200-250
COMENTARIOS 6-10 0-3 0-3 0-3 6-10
TIPO_MODA 3 3 8 10 10
TOTAL ITEMS 205 261 301 368 299
4.5.2 Association Rules: The dataset was analyzed by
Association rules, operators were configured: FP-GROWTH
for the formation of frequent item sets and ASOCIATION
RULES CREATE to generate the association rules. Having
evaluated the model were generated 9 frequent item sets and 4
association rules shown in Figure 1.
Fig. 1. Frequent item sets and association rules
The model was run several times, with a minimum value of
support 0.8 (default) from 0.5 to 0.8.
4.6. Development: According to the results of the
evaluation of the models can be made the following
conclusions:
4.6.1 Clustering: Given the information shown in Table 1,
clusters 1, 2 and 3 are discarded because they have similar
characteristics in their attributes, we proceed to analyze
clusters 0 and 4 with the following observations:
• In the cluster 0 can be seen that are 205 pictures where the
most important attribute is the large number of "likes" (200-
250) and the number of comments, which refers to the
DRESSING GOWN fashion. This indicates that this type of
dress is one of those who likes most users and therefore they
make many comments about it.
• In cluster 4, there are 299 images where you can see that
the most important attribute is the kind of fashion, which refers
to long cocktail dresses. Significantly, these dresses are
preferred by users due to the large number of comments and
likes, and is one of the strengths of the company in study since
as shown in Table 1 there are 667 publications with this type of
design grouped in clusters 3 and 4.
4.6.2 Association Rules: Given the association rules that
were generated, it shown in Figure 1, it can be concluded that
the photographs with the highest number of likes and
comments are published between 2012 and 2013.
5. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
For the company's case study it was very important to know
the preferences of their customers, as this is an important input
to develop marketing strategies based on the analysis
performed his followers clients in Instagram social network.
The analysis established that preferred by customers are
long cocktail dresses, followed by the dressing gowns. It could
also be determined that the years 2012 and 2013 were the
 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)
highest number of likes and comments had these clothes. This
information is valuable because the company can design and
implement strategies that take into account these kinds of
preferences and achieve satisfaction and customer loyalty to
boost this clothing.
Similarly, it is evident that the use of information generated
by social networks, together with modern computational
techniques such as data mining allows companies to know the
preferences and behavior of their customers, without the need
for surveys or any other field work.
As future work, it would be interested to test the data
mining models developed in this research with other social
networks like Facebook and other companies, such as
commercial enterprises.

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