Social Media Analytics – Telecom Sector (II)

social-media-conversation-map-telecom-sector

Telecom service providers: Understand your brand through social media sentiments

With its mammoth extensive research and user base, social media is one channel, Telco’s can’t ignore nowadays. Increasing number of customers today are sharing their views, experiences and expectations around brands, services and products on online forums and various networking platforms. Thus, it is now essential for Telco’s to listen to the buzz around their brands to make the right strategic decisions and stay in front. By leveraging numerous social media analytic tools, they can not only plan their connection with customers in an organized manner, but can also garner unique insights into brand awareness, market trends, consumer preferences, spending patterns, and consumer buying behavior.

Since stringently monitoring the number of followers might not be that important as it was estimated initially, social media analytics quickly moved to include the sizeable number of actively engaged followers on a page who post, comment and participate in activities. Though this is a much better method yet there are some inconsistencies around this method since it doesn’t highlight the whole story surrounding a brand nor clearly states whether the stories are positive or negative. That’s where social media sentiment analysis comes in, since it’s an extremely important aspect and should be a key determinant while evaluating one’s company’s social media strategy.

With the aid of social media analytics tools, telecom companies are relentlessly monitoring relevant insights from social media conversations. Within the substantial volume of discussions happening all round lies a wealth of relevant information for telecom firms like insights regarding their limitations in areas related to products, websites, customer services or cloud based application clients hating or loving; understanding their customer’s voice and further mapping with its competition; thereby being able to make informed decisions on time. With such tools available, it’s imperative to harness the information and use it to one’s organization’s benefit.

Fusion Analytics World now analyzes the sentiments flowing around telecom service providers:

1. Sentiment Balance:

Sentiment balance shows the proportionate balance of positive and negative sentiments expressed in conversations from social media. Fusion Analytics World automatically categorizes data under positive, negative and neutral sentiment using advanced text analysis and natural language processing.social-media-sentiment-analysis-telecom-sector

The chart clearly shows that AT&T has a much better sentiment balance than Sprint, Vodafone and Verizon. For Sprint, the share of negative sentiments is actually quite higher than that of its positive sentiments, for Vodafone its negative and positive sentiments are quite similar while Verizon little better placed with relatively better positive sentiments than negative ones.

Vodafone with high volume and high negative sentiment indicates most of the conversations are not what their PR and Marketing teams would like to see. Insights like these help brands take immediate actions before things go out of control, especially by knowing the topics of discussion elaborated in the next section.

2. Understanding the Conversation Map:

The Fusion Analytics World analysis goes deeper into the data to understand through conversation map about what customers talk on social media. For the Telco’s, bubble shows the size of each conversation topic, and lines connecting the bubbles show how frequently these different topics were discussed together on the same mention (i.e., tweets or blogs etc). –social-media-conversation-map-telecom-sector

iPhone, Deals, Network, Billing, Payment, Contracts, and Commercials were the few top conversation topics around the service providers. Amongst them Billing and Payments were the most discussed topics on the same mention. Understanding relative proportions of discussions with the help of above visualizations can help marketers’ device appropriate promotions. For example understanding that discussions around texting is 3 times more popular than data plans, iPhone discussions are way more popular than Android etc., can help in leveraging appropriate topics for their next marketing campaign.

3. Understanding the positive and negative topics

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To identify the causes responsible for these we used advanced deep text analytic techniques to identify the common negative themes present in these mentions. Image below shows a word cloud of the most common positive and negative themes present in mentions for telecom service providers.

The top negative themes emerging from the above analysis for telcos are their prepaid network and phone bills. It looks like their customers are not really enjoying these as much as Telco’s would want them to. Looking deeper, we also find that people are associating service challenges, specifically phone and plan related problems with Sprint phones which might be a wakeup call for Sprint management team.

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Kalyan Banga226 Posts

I am Kalyan Banga, a Post Graduate in Business Analytics from Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta, a premier management institute, ranked best B-School in Asia in FT Masters management global rankings. I have spent 14 years in field of Research & Analytics.

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