Extending Customer Profiles with Social Media Data: The Challenge of User Identification

Marketers are continuously trying to appoint consumers and enforce methods supporting potential buyers in their purchasing decisions. In the last few years the increased speed in developing internet-based communication technologies has engaged the popularity of social network sites (SNS). Thus, the success of Social CRM lies on the choice of methods and technology that a company selects to empower highly individualised and diverse channel interaction. The challenge for businesses is to identify users on social network sites and extend CRM profiles with social media data in order to create unique and differentiated campaigns for targeted deciders. This paper approaches the difficulties of identifying social users on SNS’s for potential new acquisitions and gains insight on linking SNS profiles of same SNS users. The research contribution of this thesis is to find out, if it is possible to identify social network users on Facebook based on their freely available Twitter profile data and the associated profile image with the support of analysis methods and freeware tools....