Title: Using social media for continuous monitoring and mining of consumer behaviour

Authors: Michail Salampasis; Georgios Paltoglou; Anastasia Giachanou

Addresses: Department of Informatics, Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki, Sindos, 57400, Greece ' School of Technology, University of Wolverhampton, City Campus, Office MI140, Wulfruna Street, Wolverhampton, WV1 1LY, UK ' Department of Informatics, University of Macedonia, 156 Egnatia Street, GR-540 06 Thessaloniki, Greece

Abstract: Social communication and microblogging services have known unprecedented popularity in recent years. This new digital landscape, combined with the ubiquitous online access potential of modern devices, provides novel capabilities to online users and allows them to express their opinions and attitudes about everything in almost real time. In this paper, we present an investigation on the use of social media for the continuous monitoring and mining of consumer behaviour. We analyse hundreds of thousands of microblogging messages containing comments, sentiments and opinions about food and brand products. We present initial results, which confirm previous studies about the potential of using social media monitoring for branding purposes. The results provide strong indications that given the use of such services by millions of users, they can play a key role in supporting and enhancing important business processes. Examples of such processes include company-to-customer relationship management, brand image building and word-of-mouth (WoM) branding.

Keywords: microblogging; social media monitoring; WoM branding; word-of-mouth; consumer behaviour; sentiment analysis; continuous monitoring; data mining; brand image building; customer relationship management; CRM.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEB.2014.057905

International Journal of Electronic Business, 2014 Vol.11 No.1, pp.85 - 96

Published online: 06 Feb 2015 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article