Students’ Behavior on Social Media Sites – A

Data Mining Approach

Grljević Olivera, Bošnjak Zita, Bošnjak Saša
University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Economics

Additional conclusions obtained from the visualization of the collected data:

Introduction
The power of data mining methods and techniques to discover hidden relationships, patterns of
behavior, and profiles of entities, as well as similar models, was used for the detection of knowledge
and rules of behavior of students in an online environment..
-A small number of respondents express their opinions through social media sites or exchange their
views and experiences on the forums.
-Respondents are not interested in connectivity through specialized groups.
-Respondents are much less connected through social media sites in order to play games than
expected.

The knowledge obtained in this manner could be used to facilitate the attraction, retention and to
maintain student base i.e. prevent churn and dropout.
It is a valuable starting point for the definition of proactive and preventive actions in developing
relationships with the students:
1. to attract the desired base of students,
2. for personalized marketing messages,
3. keeping students in college through predictive student profiling, as well as predictive analytics on
demographic, and
4. to predict groups of students at risk and prevent their outflow and churn.
The paper illustrates the application of CRISP-DM methodology to collected data about social media
sites usage in general and for purposes of education among future students of Faculty of Economics
Subotica in Serbia, as well as their preprocessing for intelligent analysis.
C. DATA PREPARATION
This task should facilitate the decision on data to be used in the construction of the model and its
selection criteria. A selected criterion depends on data mining objective, quality and technical
constraints regarding the size of data set and data types.
Actions taken during data preprocessing phase:
- Identification and removal of data: data collected for statistical processing, outliers, and data with
monotone values (like attribute age).
- At this point missing data was not handled, since it was expected for some data to be incomplete.
-Data transformation of attribute average grade from numerical to categorical value.
D. MODELING
In accordance to data mining goal to group similar students’ behavior on social media sites , selected
technique for data modeling is Simple K-means clustering.

Profiling students according to the frequency of certain activities they conduct on social media sites
CRISP-DM Methodology resulted in four clusters.

CRISP-DM methodology is based on a hierarchical model of the process that takes place in six stages . 4

3.5

A. BUSINESS UNDERSTANDING 3

The goal of the first step of CRISP-DM methodology is to define the reasons and objectives of KDD 2.5 watch videos

process which are depend upon the business area of the company for which the intelligent data comment videos
read blogs and wikis
analysis is conducted.. 2
comment blogs and wikis
write blogs or wikis

The higher education sector is a specific area of application of data mining, but the institutions of the 1.5 visit social media sites
read comments on forums
sector can greatly benefit from their use. Some of the business goals of interest to the higher 1

education sector, especially in the field of student relationship management, relate to the:
1. monitoring and prediction of success during the studies, 0.5

2. reduction of the risk of dropout and failure, 0

3. prevention of the outflow of students and their transition to the competition, Cluster 1 Cluster 2 Cluster 3 Cluster 4

4. optimization of the course popularity and certain subjects,

5. attraction of new students, and so on.

Predictive analysis of traditional data sources (socio-demographic and internal data) can trace The following table illustrates cluster assignments when students are profiled in accordance to their
different student metrics, and from these data potential for success or failure of a student can be preferred motives and habits for online social engagement.
predicted, as well as management of the risk of churn and drop-out.
Cluster 1 Cluster 2 Cluster 3 Cluster 4
Trend analysis will reveal what changes over time and how. Maintain contact yes yes yes yes
Make new friendship no no yes no
User behavior modeling will identify patterns of students’ behavior, etc. More information about
contacts no no no no
State an opinion no no yes no
Social media analytics can provide media message personalization, targeting of desired group of Comment no no no no
candidates, shaping the offer in accordance to customer preferences, web behavior analytics enable Watch videos yes yes yes yes

customization of the content on the homepage, etc. Share content yes no yes yes
Blog/wiki yes no no no
Specialized groups
The aim of the research presented in this paper is to allow better comprehension of the way students Search for content
yes no no no

yes no yes yes

connect through the Internet and social media sites, and to identify patterns of their online Events yes no yes no
behavior, in order to gain comprehensive picture regarding new profile of consumers. These insights Games no no no no
are valuable for conceiving the business strategy and for shaping marketing activities in accordance to School activities yes no yes yes

students’ behavior, i.e. as a reaction to their actions. Communication with pupils

yes no yes yes
Communication with teachers
no no yes no

B. DATA UNDERSTANDING Brands yes no no no

Discounts yes no no no
Includes the steps of collecting and transforming the data into a format that can be used by the
selected data mining tools, data description, data exploration and verification of data quality.

Data on future students’ behavior on social media sites at the Faculty of Economics in
Subotica, Serbia, were collected through a questionnaire in June 2012. The questionnaire included 13
questions, with appropriate sub questions, given the total of 100 attributes. Question groups:
1. basic data about students,
2. familiarity with various social media sites, the frequency of visits, purpose and motives for Conclusion
networking and sharing the content, and frequency of performing certain activities,
3. the use of social media sites for a college selection, for the education needs (time spent
online, frequency of content sharing related to the school, engagement in certain activities on these This paper illustrates CRISP-DM methodology on the data on the behavior and activities of future
sites, and association with professors). students of Faculty of Economics Subotica on the social media sites, with the emphasis on data
preprocessing.
Initial insights regarding collected data:
- 303 students completly fullfiled questionnaire, 211 female and 92 male. Since different user personalities, engaged in social media communication, produce variety of groups
- Respondents come form 69 different cities. and usage profiles, identification of different user profiles among prospect students seems like an
- Vizualization of social media sites according to frequency of use essential step.

Discovering habits and preferences of future students towards the social media on the Internet brings
many benefits and advantages to the institution, especially in the domain of attraction of new students
and enrollment marketing strategy.

Desired candidate profiling and analysis of their behavior on the Web can increase brand awareness
and increase conversion rate.

- Some of the most common reasons for connecting via social media sites: keeping in touch with
friends, online videos, communication with other students for educational purposes, content
sharing, follow school activities, and information and quest for quality content
Presented findings show that there are distinct online behavioral patterns among students. There are
students who only use social media sites for entertainment purposes, they do not influence other
peoples’ opinion neither their opinion can be influenced by others, on the other hand small portion of
respondents are influential users that shape public opinion and should be reached and motivated to
promote faculty in the finest manner. Word of mouth marketing is a very powerful tool!

IEEE 11th International Symposium on

Intelligent Systems and Informatics

SISY2013