Using Social Media for Continuous Monitoring and Mining of Consumer Behaviour

Social communication and microblogging services, together with the ubiquitous online access which keep Internet users constantly connected, provide unprecedented capabilities for the constant connectivity of people and offer a tremendous facility for expressing their opinions, attitudes or reactions about every human activity. In this paper we present an initial investigation of the use of social media for the continuous monitoring and mining of consumer behaviour. We analysed thousands of tweets containing branding comments, sentiments, and opinions about food products. Initial results which are presented in this paper are in line with other results reported in the literature and make us believe that given their dominant use by millions of Internet users, and their distinct characteristics and opportunities, these microblogging services can play a key role in supporting and enhancing important business processes in food industry such as company to customer relationship, brand image building, word-of-mouth branding.