Using Social Media for Continuous Monitoring and Mining of Consumer Behaviour

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.