By Huaxia Rui, Andrew Whinston and Elizabeth Winkler
Wall Street Journal
There’s a new tool that can help companies predict sales for the coming weeks, or decide whether to increase inventories or put items on sale in certain stores.
It’s Twitter.
Social-media sites such as Twitter have made it increasingly easy to find out what consumers think and want without the limitations and bias associated with older market-research tools such as surveys and focus groups. With Twitter, users broadcast what they are doing or thinking via “tweets,” short messages of 140 characters or less. People can “tweet” about anything at any time—from the long lines at the grocery store to a great sale at the mall to a new restaurant or movie—which allows for word-of-mouth to spread at astonishing speed. Anyone can follow a user’s messages, and tweets are easily searchable using keywords.
We believe executives can make accurate predictions about sales trends by analyzing tweets that mention their products or services, and we have created a model based on Twitter’s keyword-search function to help them do that.
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