Using information visualization techniques to improve the perception of the organizations’ image on social networks

Abstract

Nowadays it is notorious the growth and the popularity of social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, especially with the facilities provided by the use of mobile devices. Considering these social networks, Twitter has a different approach: a friendship connection doesn’t need to exist and a person can follow another person or organization just to receive its tweets. So, this social network is often used as a way to get general or specific news and to express (dis)satisfaction about products, politics, organizations, etc. Considering this, the need for organizations to monitor what people are “saying” about them has arisen. Thus, the main goal of this work is to understand how information visualization techniques can support and improve the analysis of the perceived image of organizations on social networks. For this, we developed an application prototype to support sentiment analyses on Twitter and we conducted a study on how this prototype, called MentionStats, can contribute to the company’s image analysis on Twitter. This study consisted on interviews with professionals about their perceptions of the MentionStats and its visualizations. Our main contribution are the presented possibilities of using information visualization techniques in order to help users to deepen the analysis of their organizations image on social networks, and also users’ impressions about this.