Multi-Channel Sentiment Analysis in Swedish as Basis for Marketing Decisions

Abstract: In today’s world, it is not enough for companies to consider any one social media channel in isolation. Instead, they must provide their customers with a unified experience across channels and consider interdependencies between channels. Most marketing research that examines user generated content is focused on a single channel and is limited to the English language. This thesis analyses Swedish language content collected from eight different social media platforms: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, and Google Reviews. The platforms were compared pairwise by the prevalence of positive, negative, and neutral sentiment in comments and reviews about the theme park Liseberg. The sentiment was predicted using a lexical approach where each word in a wordlist was assigned a weight to denote positive or negative sentiment associated with the word. The study found that there is a statistically significant difference between the positivity, negativity, and neutrality expressed by users on the different social media channels. There was no difference in sentiment between YouTube and Instagram comments, but there were differences in at least one of the three sentiment categories for all other pairwise comparisons of platforms. Having an understanding of the attitudes towards the brand in different channels can support marketers in determining their optimal mix of social media channels. These results are also of interest to researchers who should take the differences between social media platforms into consideration when designing studies around user generated content.