Consumers´ Sentiment Analysis of Popular Phone Brands and Operating System Preference Using Twitter Data: A Feasibility Study

Sentiment analysis of the text data available on the web either in the form of blogs or at social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, offers information through which to assess people´s perspective of products and services that are of interest to them. Consumers routinely scour the Internet to assess other user´s reviews for a product or a service before making their own decision. Likewise, these same data can potentially provide businesses a snapshot in time of the users´ response to their products/services and even the trends over time. This information gained through sentiment analysis can then be used by businesses to make decisions about improving their products and services, and gain an increased edge over their competitors. In this paper, we illustrate the potential of sentiment analysis of Twitter data to gauge users´ response to popular smart phone brands and their underlying operating systems. Specifically, our objective is to investigate whether the tweets available on the web are sufficient to gain useful insight about the performance of popular smart phone brands, their battery life, screen quality, and on the perceived performance of the phones operating systems. Our results show that although the Twitter data does provide some information about users´ sentiments to the popular smart phone brands and their underlying operating systems, the amount of data available for different brands varies significantly. This limitation makes the comprehensive analysis of users´ response somewhat more challenging for some brands compared to others and consequently makes the comparison between brands almost impossible.