Social network analysis for small business lead generation

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The proposed research is in the area of social network analysis and predictive analytics. It should have an**impact in Canadian ICT (Information and Communications Technology) sector. WITS Consulting is an**Ontario-based company providing business tools and consulting services to primarily small businesses. One of**the challenges faced by these small business companies is the lead generation. Currently, WITS Consulting**offers one-to-one solution to help the lead generation process, which requires a lot of manual efforts and**largely limit its capability of serving multiple companies at the same time. To solve this problem, in this**project, we propose to build an automatic lead generation system that could identify and rank leads from social**network connections. Two main research challenges we must tackle include: 1) how to find a proper set of**keywords to describe the business so that we can search on the social network to identify leads; 2) how to**predict the likelihood of a social network user being interested in the service offered by the small business**company. To successfully build the proposed system, the following three tasks are identified: 1) expanding the**initial keywords provided by small businesses using semantic knowledge graph and text mining on social**networks; 2) using the expanded keyword list to search on the social network to find leads for small businesses**and applying community detection technique to identify more leads; 3) building machine learning model to**predict the levels of interest of these identified leads on the offered service and rank them based on their**probabilities of becoming the potential clients. The proposed project could benefit WITS Consulting by**attracting more small business companies to use their lead generation service. It could also benefit these small**businesses to attract more potential clients.