An effective Decision Support System for social media listening based on cross-source sentiment analysis models

Nowadays, companies and enterprises are more and more incline to exploit the pervasive action of on-line social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Indeed, several promotional and marketing campaigns are carried out by concurrently adopting several social medial channels. These campaigns reach very quickly a wide range of different categories of users, since many people spend most of their time on on-line social media during the day. In this work, a Decision Support System (DSS) is presented, which is able to efficiently support companies and enterprises in managing promotional and marketing campaigns on multiple social media channels. The proposed DSS continuously monitors multiple social channels, by collecting social media users’ comments on promotions, products, and services. Then, through the analysis of these data, the DSS estimates the reputation of brands related to specific companies and provides feedbacks about a digital marketing campaign. The core of the proposed DSS is a Sentiment Analysis Engine (SAE), which is able to estimate the users’ sentiment in terms of positive, negative or neutral polarity, expressed in a comment. The SAE is based on a machine learning text classification model, which is initially trained by using real data streams coming from different social media platforms specialized in user reviews (e.g., TripAdvisor). Then, the monitoring and the sentiment classification are carried out on the comments continuously extracted from a set of public pages and channels of publicly available social networking platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram). This approach is labeled as cross-source sentiment analysis. After some discussions on the design and the implementation of the proposed DSS, some results are shown about the experimentation of the proposed DSS on two scenarios, namely restaurants and consumer electronics online shops. Specifically, first the application of effective sentiment analysis models, created relying on user reviews is discussed: the models achieve accuracies higher than 90%. Then, such models are embedded into the proposed DSS. Finally, the results of a social listening campaign are presented. The campaign was carried out by fusing data streams coming from real social channels of popular companies belonging to the selected scenarios.