Predicting consumer’s tastes through social media data
Introduction
Social media is the basic definition of technology in the twenty-first century with billions of uses all over the world. through social media, the world has been centralized into a small community where one though hundreds of thousand miles far apart, can still communicate, interact, and socialize as if they are just next door. Globalization would have not been anything if it were not for the various social media platforms that are available to connect people and places in a real-time manner. As a matter of fact, social media platforms have completely transformed and affected every bit of social sciences, business operations, product promotion, and marketing operations by changing the relationship dynamics between employees, stakeholders, firms, and their targeted market (customers). To the very basics, of social media platforms used in product promotion and marketing as per the media statistics released in early February 2020 are as follows, Facebook, having over 2.51 billion users, twitter that has approximately 2.3 billion users, Instagram has over 1.8 billion users, QQ and Tumblr both having more than 800 million users. The global projection in a number of social media users by 2022 to be over 3.5 billion users, which will be 45.3 percent of the world’s total population.
Given the massive and high number of the potential audience provided in by these social medial platforms and spend three-quarter of their day online browsing through one platform to another, it is not surprising that the producers and marketers have shifted and now fully embracing these social media platforms as their primary marketing channels to win consumers teste towards their products. The future of marketing is likely to advance and develop through social media platforms as it is the most effective platform for various producers, manufactures, and retail vendors to directly interact with their consumers. The most important aspect of business growth is through keeping tabs on customers and having a healthy customer relation through which they can give their comments and views pertaining to the product involved. The world of business has become more competitive in the past five years than it was before, therefore every producer is doing their level best to have and maintain a close and more effective customer relationships in order to keep and expand their market population. Thanks to these various social media platforms that have to widen the market scope ass most businesses can conveniently trade internationally just through online platforms.
Over the past five years, an explosion of interest in the big social data has been registered among producers and marketers in the large scale empirical dataset from online social networking platforms. Big, moderate, and small firms and business enterprises all over the world are continuously working ways to tap into this opportunity to formulate their marketing techniques, public relations, customer relations management, and promotional campaigns. Although big social data represents immense opportunity, many firms still struggle to design and create value from their big social data analytics. Therefore this report presents the synthesized critical analysis on the impact and use of social media platforms in predicting consumers’ tastes and preferences on goods and services provided by business entities.
Social media analytics SMA
Though social media might be viewed as the mobile-based and web-based internet application that facilitates the access, creation, and exchange of user-generated content that is ubiquitously accessible. For convenience, social media in this publication will equivalently refer to wikis, blogs, really simple syndication RSS feeds and online news, and any typically yielding unstructured texts and are accessible through the web. The purpose of social media has transformed not only to be a platform where individuals connect to share personal views and experiences but it’s a place for brands and costumers to interact with producers. Most business enterprises and big companies use social media monitoring techniques to keep track of the ongoing activities in the world market by tracking and gathering consumers’ opinions on various social media platforms. The gathered information form the basis of production in that the product is in line with consumers’ expectation thus meeting the consumers’ expectations. Social media gives credible information on what a particular region likes most and this is extracted from their daily posts on Instagram and various hashtag trends on twitter, therefore, prov9iding credible sources of information for manufactures. Most Companies of the 21st century uses social media platforms to derive consumer’s insight. It is quite imperative for companies weighting for a couple of months to go around with paperwork in the name of market surveys to establish consumers’ preference to still be relevant and compete equally with companies that use the trending innovations of social media to gauge and understand its consumer’s preference. As (name) stated, social media is omniscience but not omnipotent. This implies that the business ventures need to have an explicit and unlimited understanding of the market dynamics and incorporate customers’ opinions in making or manufacturing products that are directly in line with what customers need. SMA provides a conversational platform for content creation, dissemination, and further communication within the global community thus further inter-community relations. However, the main challenge with social media analytics is to filter the most useful information among the endless streaming posts from different corners of the world as the inflow of information is not controllable. It is upon firms to establish which of the different analytical techniques best fit and add value in the product the firms specialize in.
Social media analytic tools to predict consumers’ teste
Consumers’ taste and preference on any particular product is not permanent and is subject to change at any time they wish so. It is upon business operators to understand the dynamics in their consumers’ taste and act accordingly to maintain their customers. A typical example is the restaurant operations that deal with consumable goods. They need to be informed at all times and be able to predict what changes that could make their customers have different taste and incorporate that early enough to avoid customers fall out. Social media platforms provide an avenue for such kind of business to have an opportunity to adequately analyze their consumers’ behavior and predict the direction of the possible change in taste and preference of their customers’. Various social media analytic tools can effectively help firms predict their consumers’ tastes. Some of the tools are as follows
Sentiment analysis or Opinion Mining
Social media posts are not usually censored therefore all kinds of information can be relayed concerning any particular product. Hence the firms are expected to use sentiment analysis to analyze the posts from different people’s opinions, attributes, evaluations, sentiment, emotions, and judgment on tangible or intangible products and services. For example, banking institutions use sentiment analysis to recognize and control pertinent issues regarding service deliveries to customers through social medial handles and adjust their services to the demands of customers, thus keeping and attracting more customers. Bank of Australia implemented the opinion mining technique to gather critical information that would help shape their customer services and they manage to receive over 50,000 comments in a day. As a matter of fact, not all the 50,000 comments were logical therefore through the help of the sentiment analysis they managed to filter the most relevant information and used them to restructure to meet both current and future customers’ expectations. Twitter on the other hand has been so detrimental in shipping political affairs such as conducting opinion poll on elective positions for different countries and it has proven to be of influence on the election outcomes. Similarly, business entities can extract useful information from hashtags and trending topics on the platform to predict the consumers’ shift in taste and act promptly to keep fit for the stiff completion and even out-do their competitors who do not maximize of social media platforms. Generally, opinion mining or sentiment analysis techniques are important tools that are used by firms to gather crucial information that helps them in predicting consumers’ shift in taste.
Engagement analysis
Consumer engagement is the interaction between producers and the consumers either directly or through intermediaries. The success of any business operation depends on how effective and efficient is its customer relationships. And this can only be valued by how frequently they engage with their customers and respond to the issues raised by customers. It’s normal that not all engagement with customers is professional but all are important in understanding consumers’ demands and ideas that would help in predicting their future preference. Engagement analysis enables organizations to put into weight and analyze the level of consumers’ satisfaction or frustrations thus providing an avenue for organizations to predict consumers’ taste and preference. Consumers interact with organizations, products, and brands daily through social media network platforms. Social media plays a crucial role in advertisement and branding of products thus promoting the marketing of products. For example in 2011 when New Zealand based financial provide ASSB launched a virtual online branch to facilitate and improve its customers’ engagement, within a month, the app had accumulated over 25.000 Facebook likes and approximately 16,000 downloads in the same month. Repetitive interaction with a particular product on social media platforms potentially influence users taste and starts to develop an interest in that particular product thus changing the taste of consumer towards that product. Almost all companies and firms have social media analysts as part of their staff enhance the communication and online relation with global customers and derive equivalently important information that is used to develop the product quality and quantity as per consumers demand.
Social network analysis
This technique is essential in evaluating and establishing connections of different nodes in the marketing network in or5der to fully understand the underlying networks, importance, and relationship among different nodes (users). Social network analysis is used by firms and organizations to model the growth connection and dynamics of network operations in social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Social; media platforms have cultural significance as many users share posts that display their cultural practices and way of life. Through such posts, shoppers and firms extract valuable information and use in predicting taste and preference of people from different parts of the world. For example, KFC being an international business entity has a varied recipe for its products depending on the country of operation since the taste and preference of Pizza in Australia is completely different from the one in South Africa. Hence social network analysis is very critical in predicting consumers’ tastes depending on their location and cultural practices displayed from their online posts through Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr Instagram, etc.
Conclusion
Social media can be perceived from different angles depending on the intent of its application. In a practical aspect, it is the collection of software-based digital technologies that give users a platform where they can exchange information on a social network. For entrepreneurs, social media has a totally different meaning as defined as the online marketing platform where producers and manufactures can directly communicate and interact with their customers through advertisement and product branding. Therefor social aspect of social media provides an avenue for analysis for entrepreneurs to learn more about the social life and activities of their customers hence use such information to predict the taste and preference of their consumers. These enable them to produce goods and services that are in line with consumer’s needs.
The global market has been centralized through the use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, etc. to strengthen the connection between firms and customers. They give direct interaction as customers can raise their concerns directly to the management about products and service delivery. Customers’ taste in products and services is crucial for organizational development as it gives information and opportunities on ways to maximize product sales and development.
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