Experiment - 9

Aim:-
Develop social media text analytics models for comparing competitors and your existing
product/service by analyzing customers reviews/ comments.

Theory:-

In the digital age, customers express their opinions and experiences about products and services
through social media platforms, review websites, and discussion forums. Organizations can
leverage these unstructured text data to gain insights into customer sentiment, preferences, and
areas of improvement. Text analytics techniques, powered by Natural Language Processing
(NLP) and Machine Learning (ML), enable businesses to extract valuable patterns from
customer feedback.

This paper presents an approach to developing social media text analytics models for
comparing competitors and analyzing customer reviews to enhance product/service offerings
and improve decision-making.

1. Text Analytics for Social Media Data

Text analytics involves transforming unstructured text data into meaningful insights through
various NLP techniques such as sentiment analysis, topic modeling, named entity recognition
(NER), and aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA).

Key Components of Social Media Text Analytics:

1.​ Data Collection – Gathering customer comments, reviews, and feedback from sources
like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Trustpilot, and Google Reviews.​

2.​ Preprocessing – Cleaning and normalizing text by removing noise (stopwords, special
characters, emojis, URLs), tokenization, lemmatization, and stemming.​

3.​ Feature Engineering – Extracting key textual features using techniques such as TF-IDF,
word embeddings (Word2Vec, GloVe, BERT), and N-grams.​

4.​ Sentiment Analysis – Classifying customer feedback into positive, negative, or neutral
sentiment to understand public perception.​

5.​ Topic Modeling – Identifying underlying themes in customer reviews using LDA (Latent
Dirichlet Allocation) or BERTopic.​

6.​ Competitor Benchmarking – Comparing sentiment scores, topics, and customer

concerns between different brands.​
2. Sentiment Analysis for Competitor Comparison
Sentiment analysis is crucial for understanding brand perception across competitors. It involves
using machine learning or deep learning techniques to classify customer comments into different
sentiment categories.

2.1 Sentiment Analysis Approaches

●​ Lexicon-based methods – Using predefined sentiment lexicons (VADER,

SentiWordNet) to assign polarity scores to words.​

●​ Machine Learning-based methods – Using supervised learning models (SVM, Random

Forest, Logistic Regression) trained on labeled sentiment datasets.​

●​ Deep Learning-based methods – Utilizing LSTMs, BERT, or transformer-based models

for contextual sentiment understanding.​

2.2 Sentiment Score Comparison Across Competitors

●​ Aggregate sentiment scores to compare overall customer satisfaction levels.​

●​ Temporal analysis to observe sentiment trends over time.​

●​ Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) to evaluate customer sentiment for different

aspects like price, quality, customer service, delivery speed.​

3. Topic Modeling for Understanding Customer Concerns

Topic modeling helps discover recurring themes in customer discussions and identify areas of
improvement for products or services.

Popular Topic Modeling Techniques

●​ Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) – Identifies probabilistic distributions of words

across topics.​

●​ Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) – Decomposes word frequency matrices

into topic-related factors.​

●​ BERTopic – Uses transformer-based embeddings and clustering to detect coherent topics

in textual data.​

4. Named Entity Recognition (NER) for Product Feature Analysis

NER can help identify mentions of products, features, and competitor names in social media
comments.

Applications of NER in Competitive Analysis

●​ Detecting brand names and comparing mentions across different platforms.​

●​ Identifying product features frequently discussed by customers.​

●​ Extracting common pain points associated with a competitor’s offerings.​

5. Visualization and Reporting for Decision Making

Effective visualization of sentiment trends, topic distributions, and competitor comparisons helps
businesses make informed decisions.

Data Visualization Techniques

●​ Bar charts and Pie charts – Sentiment distribution across competitors.​

●​ Word clouds – Most frequently mentioned terms in reviews.​

●​ Time-series plots – Sentiment fluctuations over time.​

●​ Heatmaps – Customer sentiment for different product aspects.​

6. Model Evaluation and Performance Metrics

Ensuring model accuracy is crucial for reliable insights. Some key evaluation metrics include:

Sentiment Analysis Model Evaluation

●​ Accuracy – Overall classification correctness.​

●​ Precision, Recall, and F1-score – Evaluating positive/negative classification

performance.​

●​ ROC-AUC – Measuring model discrimination ability.​

7. Business Applications and Competitive Strategy

Implementing social media text analytics provides the following benefits:

7.1 Strategic Business Decisions

 ●​ Enhance Product Development – Identify commonly requested features.​

●​ Improve Customer Service – Detecting and resolving recurring complaints.​

●​ Brand Positioning – Understand where your brand stands against competitors.​

●​ Marketing Optimization – Tailor campaigns based on customer sentiment insights.​

7.2 Competitive Analysis Use Cases

●​ Benchmarking Against Rivals – Compare sentiment trends across competitors.​

●​ Tracking Market Perception – Observe public reaction to new product launches.​

●​ Crisis Management – Detect early signs of negative sentiment and take corrective
actions.​

Comparison between news articles from The Guardian, The Hindu,and ABC News:-
Code and Output:
Conclusion:-
Social media text analytics empowers businesses to transform unstructured customer feedback
into actionable insights for strategic advantage. By employing NLP techniques such as sentiment
analysis, topic modeling, and named entity recognition, organizations can monitor public
perception, identify emerging concerns, and benchmark performance against competitors. These
insights not only guide product and service enhancements but also inform marketing strategies,
brand positioning, and customer experience improvements, ultimately driving informed
decision-making and sustained competitive growth in a digitally connected marketplace.