Identifying Virtual Relations among Businesses Exploring User Reaction on Facebook

We live today in a highly competitive world in many areas, for instance, in the business world. Thus, strategic business partnerships become important for a business to succeed, especially for those exposed to a dynamic and uncertain market. Therefore, this study aims to identify expressive virtual relationships among businesses that are generated spontaneously by users in social media. To this end, a business similarity model based on common spontaneous reactions of users in social media, particularly Facebook, is proposed, as well as a new algorithm for detecting business communities within the proposed model. To demonstrate the proposed approach, the study uses more than 280 million user reactions on Facebook about businesses in Curitiba, Brazil. Exploring these data and the proposed approach, this study shows the possibility to identify non-trivial relations between businesses, which might enable the development of new mechanisms for recommending strategic business partnerships for entrepreneurs and business owners.