A novel social media competitive analytics framework with sentiment benchmarks

In today's competitive business environment, there is a strong need for businesses to collect, monitor, and analyze user-generated data on their own and on their competitors' social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. To achieve a competitive advantage, it is often necessary to listen to and understand what customers are saying about competitors' products and services. Current social media analytics frameworks do not provide benchmarks that allow businesses to compare customer sentiment on social media to easily understand where businesses are doing well and where they need to improve. In this paper, we present a social media competitive analytics framework with sentiment benchmarks that can be used to glean industry-specific marketing intelligence. Based on the idea of the proposed framework, new social media competitive analytics with sentiment benchmarks can be developed to enhance marketing intelligence and to identify specific actionable areas in which businesses are leading and lagging to further improve their customers' experience using customer opinions gleaned from social media. Guided by the proposed framework, an innovative business-driven social media competitive analytics tool named VOZIQ is developed. We use VOZIQ to analyze tweets associated with five large retail sector companies and to generate meaningful business insight reports. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.