TakeAway: In need of real-time consumer feedback? Well, look no further. Twitter evolved its search capabilities to allow “searchers” to not only track the volume of tweets, but also to assign a sentiment to those tweets.
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Excerpted from, WSJ, “Follow the Tweets,” By Huaxia Rui, Andrew Whinston, and Elizabeth Winkler, November 30, 2009
There’s a new tool that can help companies predict sales for the coming weeks, or decide whether to increase inventories or put items on sale in certain stores. It’s Twitter.
Social-media sites such as Twitter have made it increasingly easy to find out what consumers think and want without the limitations and bias associated with older market-research tools … With Twitter, users broadcast what they are doing or thinking via “tweets” … People can “tweet” about anything at any time … which allows for word-of-mouth to spread at astonishing speed. Anyone can follow a user’s messages, and tweets are easily searchable using keywords …
Executives can make accurate predictions about sales trends by analyzing tweets that mention their products or services … essentially companies can monitor their “buzz” …
Imagine a company is releasing a new product into the marketplace and has spent a lot of money on advertising to create “buzz” … the company can track the buzz, determine whether the overall opinion is positive or negative and focus on specific areas of the country. The company could track the progression of tweets during and after the product’s launch to determine whether there are shifts in opinion, giving the company a chance to react quickly if there is a problem …
If executives notice a sudden surge of tweets in New York City, signaling that people will go out and buy their product over the weekend, they may want to make sure stores in the area have enough stock. Inversely, if they notice that the buzz about the product is dying out, they may decide to put the product on sale, eliminate inventory and come up with something new.
There are some challenges inherent in collecting and sorting tweets in “real time,” or as they are being sent. Twitter returns only the most recent 1,500 tweets for each keyword-search query, so if there is a sudden surge of tweets containing your keywords, you could miss some messages …
Twitter’s advanced-search feature is capable of identifying tweets as either positive or negative … Twitter determines whether a tweet has a positive or negative attitude based on “emoticons” …
Here are a few ways companies are successfully using Twitter: 1) Take note of complaints that may help improve the next generation of products and offer customer service. Listen to what Twitter users are saying about the competition and the industry in general … 2) Identify influencers … Reaching out to these Twitterers can be a key strategy for companies when launching a new product, building a new campaign or just collecting opinions … 3) Pay attention to shifts in opinion … or emoticons … 4) Follow trending topics. Twitter has recently added a trending topics section to its home page, showing the 10 most discussed topics at the moment …
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Full Article
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204731804574391102221959582.html
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