  The identification of strategic business partnerships can potentially provide
competitive advantages for businesses; however, due to the dynamics and
uncertainty present in business environments, this task could be challenging.
To help businesses in this task, this study presents a similarity model between
businesses that consider the opinions of users on content shared by businesses
on social media. Thus, this model captures significant virtual relationships
among businesses that are generated by users in the virtual world. Besides, we
propose an algorithm for detecting business communities in the considered
model. We also propose an algorithm to identify possible business outliers in
the detected communities, which could represent an automatic way to identify
non-obvious relations that might deserve particular attention of business
owners. By exploring approximately 280 million user reactions on Facebook, we
show that our results could favor the development of, for example, a new
strategic business partnership recommendation service.
