Opinion-Mining Methodology for Social Media Analytics

Social media have emerged as new communication channels between consumers and companies that generate a large volume of unstructured text data. This social media content, which contains consumers’ opinions and interests, is recognized as valuable material from which businesses can mine useful information; consequently, many researchers have reported on opinion-mining frameworks, methods, techniques, and tools for business intelligence over various industries. These studies sometimes focused on how to use opinion mining in business fields or emphasized methods of analyzing content to achieve results that are more accurate. They also considered how to visualize the results to ensure easier understanding. However, we found that such approaches are often technically complex and insufficiently user-friendly to help with business decisions and planning. Therefore, in this study we attempt to formulate a more comprehensive and practical methodology to conduct social media opinion mining and apply our methodology to a case study of the oldest instant noodle product in Korea. We also present graphical tools and visualized outputs that include volume and sentiment graphs, time-series graphs, a topic word cloud, a heat map, and a valence tree map with a classification. Our resources are from public-domain social media content such as blogs, forum messages, and news articles that we analyze with natural language processing, statistics, and graphics packages in the freeware R project environment. We believe our methodology and visualization outputs can provide a practical and reliable guide for immediate use, not just in the food industry but other industries as well.