summary of the paper "Actionable Social Media Competitive Analysis for Understanding

Customer Experiences"
What is problem?
The current highly competitive and dynamic business environment enforce enterprises to have
a strong demand to gather, understand, monitor, and examine the customers’ generated data
on social media sites, such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Blogs.
Why?
The rigorous struggle to have competitive marketing edge over competitors impose companies
to understand and analyze customer generated content on their own social media sites and on
their competitors’ social media sites.
How?
The paper proposes a framework to examine and compare the social media content from
market competitors using different social media analytical techniques, such as statistical
analysis, text mining, and sentiment analysis. The authors conducted a comprehensive case
study to find out and discuss the similarities and differences in the social media use, to increase
customer engagement, among the three largest drugstore chains in the United States including
Walgreen, CVS, and Ride Aide. The authors also incorporate the proposed framework to
understand, examine and compare the social media content generated by the drugstore chains
and their customers on their Official Facebook Sites.
What are the findings?
By pharmacy count, Walgreen is the largest, CVS is the second largest, and Rite Aid is the third
largest drugstore chains in US. The below mentioned tables clearly depicts that Walgreen has
most customer engagement, CVS is on second, and Rite Aid is on third in terms of customer
engagement on official Facebook Sites.
TABLE 1. Number of Likes, Shares, Comments, and Posts for Each Drugstore Chain Received
in June 2013

Drugstore Like Share Comments Post

Walgreen 60,976 10,895 3642 64
CVS 12,039 994 1732 28
Rite Aid 9270 1807 879 50

TABLE 3. To Paste Here

Conclusion?
The comprehensive case study reveals that the three largest drugstore chains have used
Facebook to provide information and to build strong customer relations. By analyzing
competitor’s social media, businesses can learn from each other ways to enhance their social
media usage and can detect new customer trends in developing market strategies and tactics.
Short Comings
The data taken is of one month only. The authors analyze only Facebook data. The don’t gather
any data from Twitter, YouTube and other useful social media site.
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Your Research Paper
Your Research idea
Our case study analyzes the Facebook sites of three largest retail companies (i.e. Walmart,
Kroger, and Amazon) in the United States and applies a social media competitive analytics
approach to examines the unstructured text content on their Facebook sites. We analyze the
content shared on their Facebook sites in terms of topics, categories, and shared sentiment.
Specifically, the study attempts to answer the following two questions:
o What patterns can be found from their Facebook sites?
o What are the main differences in their Facebook patterns?
Your research methodology (data collection, data sources, data analyses, text mining,
sentiment analysis)
Context of Study
Total sales from the nearly 3.8 million retail establishments in the United States reached about
$2.6 trillion in 2016. Retailers employ almost 29 million, and support more than 42 million jobs
in the U.S. The total facebook page likes and net-worth of three largest retail stores is
mentioned in table 4. This huge industry definitely requires SMA to get useful insight about
customer behavior to devise successful marketing strategies.

Retail Company Facebook Page Likes Net Worth

Walmart 34M Liked $374.80 billion
Kroger Co. 1.5M Liked $115.89 billion
Amazon 29M Liked $102.96 billion

Techniques & Tools (Used)

To answer the research questions, we followed the proposed framework listed in Figure 1 to
conduct our social media competitive analysis.
The tools and techniques used are mentioned in table 5.

Stages Technique Tool

data source Selection Official Facebook Pages Facebook Site
Data Collection Data Collected using FB Netvizz, Facepager
Graph Library
data analyses Pattern Extraction from Advance Excel, Weka,
gathered data RapidMinor
text mining Insight Gathering from Leximancer, GATE,
Unstructured Text Data RapidMinor
sentiment analysis Understanding SentiStrength,
customer behavior from SentiGem, RapidMinor
their comments

Limitations of your work / Scope of your work

The data taken is of 15 months starting from Jan 1, 2018 to Mar 31, 2019. We analyze only
Facebook data. We don’t gather any data from Twitter, YouTube and other useful social media
sites.