Branty: A social media ranking tool for brands

Abstract

In the competitive world of popular brands, strong presence in social media is of major importance for customer engagement and products advertising. Up to now, many such tools and applications enable end-users to observe and monitor their company's web profile, their statistics, as well as their market outreach and competition status. This work goes beyond the individual brands statistics since it automates a brand ranking process based on opinions emerging in social media users' posts. Twitter streaming API is exploited to track micro-blogging activity for a number of famous brands with emphasis on users' opinions and interactions. The social impact is captured from 3 different perspectives (objective counts, opinion reckoning, influence analysis), which estimate a score assigned to each brand via a multi-criteria algorithm. The results are then exposed in a Web application as a list of the most social brands on Twitter. But, are conventional metrics, such as followers, enough in order to measure the social impact of a brand? Different usage scenarios of our application reveal that the social presence of a brand is more complex than current social impact frameworks care to admit. © 2014 Springer-Verlag.