Enterprise Competitive Analysis and Consumer Sentiments on Social Media - Insights from Telecommunication Companies

The utilization of Social media tools in business enterprises has tremendously increased with an increased number of users and a corresponding upsurge in time spent online. Online social media services such as Facebook and Twitter are used by companies to introduce new products and services, provide various supports and interact with customers on daily basis. This regular interaction of businesses and consumers results in huge amount of customer-generated content which is becoming a source of insight in analysing the often erratic consumer behaviour. For companies to harness the business potential of social media to increase competitive advantage, sentiments behind textual data of both their customers and that of their competitors must be keenly monitored and analysed. This paper demonstrates how companies especially those in the Telecommunication industry can seize the opportunity presented by social media to mine textual data to gain advantage over competitors by cumulatively understanding consumer opinions, frustrations and satisfaction. Using Facebook and Twitter sites of the top three telecommunication companies in Ghana: MTN, Vodafone and Tigo the paper reveals insights from unstructured texts of customers of these three companies. The results show (1) the exponential growth of social media users in Ghana (2) impact and numbers behind active social media participation in the telecommunication industry (3) the power of social media opinion mining for competitive analysis (4) how business value could be extracted from the huge unstructured textual data available on social media and (5) the company that is more responsive to customer concerns.