Social Media Data Inputs in Product Design: Case of a Smartphone

Due to the vast availability of user-generated content, social media is considered useful for businesses to track users’ reactions, preferences and change in sentiments toward a specific product. The rise of social media is transforming the way businesses operate and interact with various related stakeholders and communities tremendously. Many businesses are competing to optimize their strategies and approaches to control this amount of information. The paper presents the importance of using social media content in the new product development and shows a new way of conversational analysis to generate the preliminary findings of an ongoing study. We undertook a case study of mobile phone, Samsung Galaxy S6, and S6 Edge, using two tools (e.g., R and NodeXL) to extract and analyze the Twitter data. Further, we used content analysis and network analysis approaches to get insights based on thematic pattern and topological metrics of social networks. Our findings show that there are considerable differences in the structure of conversational patterns of the two launches durations. The insights on these patterns can be extremely enlightening about early users’ perceptions and value judgments linked with the competing products. © 2018, Global Institute of Flexible Systems Management.