2017 2nd International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Applications
Using Social Media Listening Technique for Monitoring People’s Mentions from
Social Media: A Case Study of Thai Airline Industry
Todsanai Chumwatana
College of Information and Communication
Technology, Rangsit University,
Pathumthani 12000, Thailand
e-mail: todsanai.c@rsu.ac.th
Abstract—Since the rise of low-cost airline, air transportation
has become one of the most popular trends in travelling over
the world. This factor makes the competition in airline
industry very intense. From airline market report, it showed
that the revenue growth rate in the airline industry has been
increasing over 30% in the last few years. For this reason,
many airline brands seek for good strategies to gain more
passengers. The majority of strategies in airline market is
focusing on people feeling towards brands. Monitoring
people’s mentions and questions on social media have
consequently become an essential issue that need to be taken
into an account. This makes social media listening has been one
of the most powerful techniques to seek what people mention.
This paper proposed the methodology to identify and access
what is being said about the airline brands on social media.
The proposed technique is based on the integration of real-time
collecting people’s conversations and social media monitoring
techniques. The results showed that the number of mentions
has changed over period of time depending on information or
news posted by airline business. The majority of conversations
can be categorized into four main types: question, complaint,
mention and compliment. The contribution of this research is
to support airline management team to monitor what people’s
questions and mentions real time in order to improve the
performance of response management and stop diffusing a
potential crisis before it hits mainstream social media.
Keywords-airline industry; social media listening; people
mention; crisis management; social media
I. INTRODUCTION
In the last decade, the number of tourism both inbound
and outbound has obviously increased in Thailand. This
makes the airline industry continues to grow rapidly. Much
of that growth has driven airline business needs to find good
strategy options to gain more customers. One of many
strategies is focusing on what people mention, review and
question on social media. This is because social media has a
strong influence on people by shifting their behaviors in
many ways such as searching information, surfing, writing
reviews, and making decisions [1]. This new form of
communication has changed people behaviors all over the
world. Unfortunately, it is very challenging for airline
business to listen manually on numerous number of
messages over social media as it is time consuming and labor
intensive. This significantly makes the task of social media
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Ichayaporn Chuaychoo
College of Tourism and Hospitality
Rangsit University
Pathumthani 12000, Thailand
e-mail: ichayaporn.c@rsu.ac.th
listening has become important in the area of business [2],
[3]. Social media listening is a process of monitoring the
websites on the internet or social media channels to see
what’s being said about brand, business and other topics
related to products [4]. This technique has seriously taken
into an account in the last few years because the survey
reveals that 74% of customers rely on the information or
reviews from social media in order to make a buying
decision (source:
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/masroor/2015-
05-28/social-media-biggest-influencer-buying-decisions).
On the other hand, social media crisis can also occur in
any time and it will make businesses falls down into bad
situation. Due to this reason, the social media listening can
prevent businesses from bad situation as social media crisis
can be stopped immediately using crisis management before
it get out of hand. This paper aims to propose the social
media listening technique for Thai airline industry. This
technique is used for collecting word of mouth from social
media. All collected messages will be converted to a useful
form that stored in database in order to facilitate fast
monitoring and reporting to airline management team by
using data virtualization.
II. RELATED WORKS
Since an inefficient response to customer has caused the
loss of business profit, the social media listening has been
taken into an account in many industries in order to facilitate
fast response. Some researches on social media listening
have been proposed to help businesses keep tracking
conversations around their brands. In 2012, social media
analytics tools were used to monitor, capture and analyze
publicly posted information about the Super Bowl XLVI [5].
Input data was collected from Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.
The results from this research provided insight information
and trending social media topics associated with keyword. In
2015, using social listening to evaluate opinion research for
social network brand community were proposed by Tse-
Chuan Hsu [6]. This technique is used to checking out for
consumers and industry benchmark and analyzing a sense of
community in public opinion. Data collection is compared
against the conditional screened population samples to a
network of public opinion. As for social media in Thai, using
sentiment analysis technique for analyzing Thai customer
satisfaction were proposed in 2015 [7]. This technique
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employed Thai word extraction and sentiment analysis such as Webboard, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube or Blog.
technique to investigate customer’s conversation. Then, these These huge number of input conversation can be regarded as
conversations were analyzed to get the sentiment value. The a dynamic text which is a real-time user generated posts or
outcome from this research provided the significant benefit comments. In this paper, the most famous webboard in
for businesses to improve their quality. Furthermore, another Thailand, called Pantip, is used as a source for gathering the
research work was applied to track on Thai Twitter users [8]. data as depicted in Fig. 2.
Deep learning technique was used to classify sentiment of
Thai Twitter data in the research. Output from this research
revealed that the deep learning techniques outperform Naïve
Bayes and SVM. Lately, real-time emerging anomaly
monitoring system over text streams was proposed in 2017
[9], this technique was called “RING”. It is able to monitor
real-time text streams at different time scales from minutes
to months. From the experimental result, this technique can
process Twitter text stream with linear horizontal scalability.
III. SOCIAL MEDIA LISTENING TECHNIQUE FOR
MONITORING PEOPLE’S MENTIONS FROM SOCIAL MEDIA
In this section, using social media listening technique for Figure 2. Pantip webboard.
monitoring people’s mention about airline brand or service is
described. The proposed technique consists of five main Python programming is employed to implement a spider
phrases: collecting data from social media, cleansing data, to crawl the data from webboard and scrape for topics and
storing data to database, searching information and reporting comments as shown in Fig. 3. The crawled data is originally
as shown in Fig. 1. in form of HTML or JSON code which needs to be parsed
 and filtered by using the process of cleansing data in the next
step.

Figure 3. Python code.

B. Cleansing Data
In this step, the proposed technique applies the process of
cleansing data to involve removing unwanted data from the
input data crawled in step A. This process is based on
 extraction and natural language processing techniques. Only
Figure 1. A work flow of the proposed technique. meaningful information for social listening technique will be
extracted from crawled data as shown in Fig. 4.
From Fig. 1, collecting data from social media is the first
step in the proposed technique. Conversation over social
media is treated as an input data in this process. These
collected data will be passed through many processes as will
be described in the following sections (A - B sections).
Finally, people’s mention or question about airline brand and
service will be reported to the airline business in virtual view.
A. Collecting Data from Social Media
The proposed technique actually starts with collecting
people’s conversation from the right source of social media Figure 4. Meaningful information for social listening.

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 From Fig. 4, only topic, post, user id, datetime and IP
address will be extracted and stored into a database for
further searching and analyzing.
C. Storing Data to Database
From step B, all extracted data will be stored into the
MongoDB which is NoSQL database. MongoDB is
employed for storing the data in the proposed technique
because it can support huge number of data with the
scalability and flexibility. This such database is also able to
facilitate fast querying and accessing. As mentioned in
section B, only some extracted fields such as post, topic,
comment, user id, datetime and IP address are stored into
MongoDB as depicted in Fig. 5.
E. Reporting
This process is regarded as a final process in the
proposed technique. The data virtualization is an essential
method which is the process of aggregating data from
database source of information to develop virtual view of
information. The output from the proposed technique will be
revealed into two parts: graph data virtualization and the list
of conversation on what being said about the brand or
keyword as shown in Fig. 7.

Figure 7. The output dashboard from the proposed technique.

From Fig. 7, the output dashboard will become an

essential tool for airline management teams to handle with
critical situations as well as prevent their business from
spread widely negative word of mouth. In addition, this tool
also be able to track the questions customer may have that
Figure 5. MongoDB of extracted data. makes airline businesses can get in change in right time and
right person.
The extracted data shown in Fig. 5 will be prepared in
form of JSON for being searched in the next step. IV. EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES
D. Searching Information In this section, an experimental studies for monitoring
people’s mentions using the proposed technique is revealed.
This process is regarded as one of an important part in
The input social media website used in this experiment is
social listening technique. Querying process plays the main
www.pantip.com which is the most famous webboard in
role in this step. Keywords are set to be a pivot, sometimes
Thailand. The numerous input data were crawled from
called a gravity, to track all what people’s mention regarding
Pantip since the beginning of 2017. Up to now, there are
to the keyword. For instance, AirAsia airline business will
approximately 800,000 posts as shown in the following
selects the set of keywords such as: “AirAsia”, “Big
graph.
Loyalty” or “Tune Insurance” keywords which relate to their
brand and services. These keywords are used as the pivot to
retrieve all people’s post, mention, question and comments
stored in the database as mentioned in section C. It can be
said that the set of keywords will be fixed in the system
meanwhile the mentions will be dynamic real-time texts
crawled to the database. Then, keywords will be real-time
matched with new comer mentions in the database in order
to be ready for data virtualization in the next reporting
process as depicted in Fig. 6.

Figure 8. The proportion rate of increasing number of posts in webboard.

Then, “AirAsia” keyword was set as the pivot to be

matched with all posts in the database and retrieve only the
results which contain “AirAsia” keyword in the post. Finally,
the retrieved results will be transformed into data
 virtualization in form of graph and list of mentions as shown
Figure 6. Matching keywords and mentions in database. below.

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Figure 9. The output dashboard from the proposed technique.
From experimental analysis, it expresses that the number
of mentions change over each day depending on the social
trend at that time. For example, it has been found that the
number of mentions has increased when AirAsia launch the
promotional fare or news announcement. This is because
people will start making discussions and questions regarding
to AirAsia brand. The list of mentions can be categorized
into four main types: question, complaint, mention and
compliment. So, it would be a right time for management
team to get involve with these kind of mentions. As a result,
the proposed technique provides significant benefit for
airline businesses to immediately respond to the people who
have mentioned about the brand and service in order to
increase the number of customer base.
V. CONCLUSION
As social media has become the powerful channel
nowadays, this paper explored the use of social media
listening technique for monitoring what being mentioned
about airline brand and service. The proposed technique is
mainly based on data collection and virtualization which
consists of five main phrases: collecting, cleansing, storing,
searching and reporting. The proposed technique starts from
collecting people’s conversation data from Pantip webboard.
Then, post, topic, comment, user id, datetime and IP
address will be extracted from the collected conversation
data. These transactions will be stored into MongoDB to be
ready for being matched with the needed keywords. Finally,
the matched retrieval results will be reported in form of
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virtual view by using data virtualization technique. From the
experimental results, it shows that the number of mentions
on webboard has changed over each day depending on
promotional fares or news posted by airline business. The
majority of conversations can be categorized into four main
types: question, complaint, mention and compliment. These
people insight will help airline business to track actual
requirement and conduct crisis management. Because of this,
the proposed technique shows significant advantages for
airline business to improve the quality of service.
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