Understanding social media marketing: a case study on topics, categories and sentiment on a Facebook brand page

ABSTRACT

Social networks have changed the way information is delivered to the customers, shifting from traditional one-to-many to one-to-one communication. Opinion mining and sentiment analysis offer the possibility to understand the user-generated comments and explain how a certain product or a brand is perceived. Classification of different types of content is the first step towards understanding the conversation on the social media platforms. Our study analyses the content shared on Facebook in terms of topics, categories and shared sentiment for the domain of a sponsored Facebook brand page. Our results indicate that Product, Sales and Brand are the three most discussed topics, while Requests and Suggestions, Expressing Affect and Sharing are the most common intentions for participation. We discuss the implications of our findings for social media marketing and opinion mining.

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Index Terms

• Information systems

  • Information retrieval

    • Document representation