SegmentSizeEstimator, a research tool of the Acua Platform

Wondering what factors contribute to high levels of online engagement? In our research, we have found that one of the most reliable predictors of level of engagement for an ad, online content, or social media post for a given channel is simply size of the target population. For example, we’ve ranked viewers of YouTube channels…… Continue reading SegmentSizeEstimator, a research tool of the Acua Platform

Engineers, Aware! Commercial Tools Disagree on Social Media Sentiment

For segmentation, one often need to use sentiment analysis services. Large commercial sentiment analysis tools are often deployed in software engineering due to their ease of use. However, it is not known how accurate these tools are, and whether the sentiment ratings given by one tool agree with those given by another tool. We use…… Continue reading Engineers, Aware! Commercial Tools Disagree on Social Media Sentiment

What Really Matters?: Characterizing and Predicting User Engagement of News Postings Using Multiple Platforms, Sentiments, and Topics

This research characterizes user engagement of approximately 3,000,000 news postings of 53 news outlets and 50,000,000 associated user comments during 8 months on 5 social media platforms (i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit). We investigate the effect of sentiments and topics on user engagement across four levels of user engagement expressions (i.e. views, likes,…… Continue reading What Really Matters?: Characterizing and Predicting User Engagement of News Postings Using Multiple Platforms, Sentiments, and Topics

Measuring 9 emotions of news posts from 8 news organizations across 4 social media platforms for 8 months

Using Plutchik’s wheel of emotions framework, we identify the emotional content of 133,487 social media posts and the audience’s emotional engagement expressed in 2,824,162 comments on those posts. We measure nine emotions (anger, anticipation, anxiety, disgust, joy, fear, sadness, surprise, trust) and two sentiments (positive and negative) using two extraction resources (EmoLex, LIWC) for eight…… Continue reading Measuring 9 emotions of news posts from 8 news organizations across 4 social media platforms for 8 months

Detecting Pain Points from User-Generated Social Media Posts Using Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning, carries high potential to automatically detect customers’ pain points, which is a particular concern the customer expresses that the company can address. However, unstructured data scattered across social media make detection a nontrivial task. Thus, to help firms gain deeper insights into customers’ pain points, the authors experiment with and…… Continue reading Detecting Pain Points from User-Generated Social Media Posts Using Machine Learning