We present Social Proxy, a SaaS platform that allows users to manage their Social Network accounts and to perform Trend and Sentiment Analysis on Social content. The main services that the platform provides are: - Social Accounts Management - Monitoring - Trend and Sentiment Analysis - Analytics - Campaign Management. Social Proxy development started in 2010 and it is used in production since 2011. It has been used in Italy by important partners and customers, including NTT Data Italy, Coop Italia, Dolce & Gabbana, Benetton and Giunti Editore. Some of the developments of Social Proxy were co-funded through the Regione Toscana research project SenTaClAus – http://sentaclaus.netseven.it

1. Social Media Analysis
… according to @netseven_it

2. Introducing Net7…
• Net7 srl is an Italian SME based in Pisa, founded in 2001.
• Its core business is the development of software applications for the web using
Open Source software, with a special focus on Semantic Web and Linked Data
oriented projects.
• Special Expertise in Content Management, E-learning, E-commerce, Social Media,
Digital Humanities, Communication & Graphic Design
• Main customers: Coop Italia, Giunti Editore, NTT Data Italy, Scuola Normale of Pisa,
Naples University Federico II, Sassari Province, Unicoop Tirreno, …
• Participation in many EU funded research projects (5 running, 2 started in 2014)

3. Introducing Social Proxy …
• Social Proxy is a SaaS platform for managing Social Network accounts and performing Trend and
Sentiment Analysis on Social content. That is to say…
• Social Accounts Management : services to centrally manage posts on multiple Social Network accounts
(and multiple Social Networks as well!) at the same time
• Monitoring : ”listening” from Social Networks or web sites using parametric rules that perform searches
• Trend analysis : identifying trends that emerge from conversations on Social Networks
• Analytics : stats and reports with qualitative and quantitative indicators (eg most active users, number
of posts published, etc); integration with Facebook Insights and Google Analytics
• Campaign Management : grouping social network activities in campaigns to measure their effect

4. Some new relevant features
• Influencers Analysis: to identify the most active and
relevant users in social network conversations
• Content editors geotargeting for Facebook: operators
are allowed to manage posts on the Social Proxy that
will be visible only in specific countries.
• Demographics Analysis: to identify demographics
information of the most active users (location, sex, age,
etc)
• Sentiment Analysis: to identify users’ feeling in social
conversations (positive/negative). Supported
languages: English, Italian – currently under
development

5. Social Account Management
• Editorial features of Social Proxy that allow operators to publish new posts, to manage those waiting to
be published (Queued) and those already Published (not necessarily through the Social Proxy) in the
company’ social places.
• Posts can be published on multiple social places at the same time, in run-time or at a scheduled time.
• Posting pictures and link shortening are supported.
• Feedbacks (e.g. likes, comments, retweets, replies,…) can be managed from Social Proxy.
• Posts can be manually categorized with a configurable taxonomy system
• Social Proxy currently supports editorial features for:
– Facebook (accounts, pages, groups)
– Twitter
– YouTube (comments)
– Instagram (like and comments)
– LinkedIn (updates)
– Tumblr

6. Monitoring
• Monitoring is based on parametric rules that specify how posts can be fetched from social networks and
web sites.
• Social Proxy currently supports monitoring for:
– Facebook (profiles, pages, accounts, groups, generic search, user’s timeline)
– Twitter (search, geosearch, accounts, user’s timeline)
– Instagram (search, geosearch, accounts, user’s timeline)
– LinkedIn (groups, companies, members, network updates)
– YouTube (search, channels)
– Foursquare (tips for venues)
– Pinterest (users, boards)
– Feed RSS/Atom (web sites)
• Content can be indexed on a local search engine (based on Apache Solr), to perform higher precision
filtering
• An extension to crawl generic, predefined, web sites, is also under development

7. Monitoring: observing the flow of social conversations
• Retrieved posts are shown in feeds,
in a chronological order.
• We provide a user interface based
on “tabs”, that facilitates reading
and comparisons of multiple feeds.
It is also possible to aggregate
multiple posts in a single feed.
• Posts can be saved and classified
with a taxonomy system.

8. Analytics (Stats)
• Stats provide quantitative and
qualitative statistics for the social
accounts and social conversations
I’m managing.
• Some examples:
– Most relevant users
– Most commented posts
– Most used semantic categories
in the categorizations of posts

9. Analytics: integration with Facebook Insights

10. Trend Analysis
• Trend Analysis exploits text
analytics techniques (Entity
Extraction) to identify concepts
(and not merely keywords) in
conversations. Hashtags are also
identified.
• It is possible to follow the
evolution of trends in social
conversations in real time,
checking weekly, daily or even
hourly, the most discussed
concepts that emerge.
• It is possible to visualize the
geographic distribution of posts
on a map.

11. Trend Analysis: geographic distribution of posts

12. Link Analysis
• Link Analysis shows the most cited
web pages in social conversations.
• It allows to effectively discover “other
places” on the web, possibly
unknown beforehand, where “they
talk about me”.
• The idea: “if something is relevant it
will produce an echo on the social
conversations I’m observing”

13. Traffic Analysis
• Trend Analysis also
shows the amount of
posts fetched through
rules in time (Volume).
• The evolution in
volume of the most
cited concepts and
hashtags is also
shown.

14. Key influencers
• An analysis based on various strategies
(*) to identify the most relevant and
influential users in conversations.
• Starting point: observing social
conversations to identify interactions
and behaviours.
• It will not identify influencers only
through the number of friends/
followers that they have.
* Sources: Identifying influential spreaders in complex networks, M. Kitsak et al; Influence Marketing, Danny Brown, Sam Fiorella (Pearson 2013)

15. Competitors analysis: how-to (1)
• With monitoring rules
it is possible to check
in real time the
evolution of
conversations about
two competitors
(in the example, the two
largest supermarket
chains in Italy: Coop
and Esselunga)

16. Competitors analysis: how-to (2)
• Trend Analysis can be
used to observe
emerging trends in
conversations about
different competitors
(again in the example Coop
and Esselunga)

17. Demographics analysis
• More insights about users
involved in social conversations:
– Number of friends/followers
– Number of posts and comments
– Evolution of posts and
comments
– Gender (for Facebook Friends)
– Age (for Facebook friends)
– …

18. Sentiment
• It quickly shows the positive, negative or neutral
attitude in social posts.
• English and Italian support

19. Campaign Management
• Defining campaigns to group and plan
coordinated activities on Social Networks
• Checking the campaign through a Calendar
interface
• Scheduling posts for automatic publication
• Tracking the results through the integration of
Facebook Insights and Google Analytics

20. Live example #1: Trend Analysis on “Carta di credito”

21. Volume of posts and main concepts (in a week, in a day)

22. 5 trending concepts

23. Main concepts “tag cloud”

24. Sample posts with “American Express”

25. Top hashtags

26. Relationship between concepts and hashtags

27. Link Analysis

28. Link Analysis

29. Info:
http://www.netseven.it/servizi/social-media-analysis/
Net7 srl
Pisa – Italy
http://www.netseven.it - info@netseven.it
@netseven_it - facebook.com/Netseven
Some of the developments of Social Proxy were co-funded through the Regione Toscana research project SenTaClAus – http://sentaclaus.netseven.it