Remember Twitter? It’s a Useful Research Tool for Your Business

Twitter has been around for 14 years. Every second, on average, around 6,000 tweets are tweeted on Twitter, which corresponds to over 350,000 tweets sent per minute, 500 million tweets per day and around 200 billion tweets per year.

You’d think that most people – most business people – have a good sense of how to use Twitter to promote your businesses, products, services and knowledge; how to become a thought leader thanks to Twitter.

However, there are still fascinating depths of social media knowledge and experiences to be plumbed.

As I have written in the past, in order to become a thought leader in your industry or marketplace, you need knowledge and a means to convey it to others. A couple of days ago I came across a Reuters story about the Bank of Italy using Twitter to track consumer mood on pricing. And what business wouldn’t want to know what consumers think about prices?

The wire service reported on February 15 that the Bank of Italy stated that a set of experimental indicators that it created based on the content of millions of tweets accurately tracked consumer mood on price, offer scope for a powerful new monetary policy tool.

The Italian bank found its indicators not only tallied with final inflation read-outs and existing measures of price expectations by Italy’s national statistics office, financial markets and other forecasters but were also in real-time and provided more granular detail.

“The results suggest that Twitter can be a new timely source for devising a method to elicit beliefs,” the authors of the 107-page study were quoted as indicating, adding they believed the Italy-focused research could be replicated elsewhere.

The study started by gathering 11.1 million tweets posted in Italian between June 2013 and December 2019 containing at least one of a set of previously selected words related to inflation, prices and price dynamics.

“The rationale for focusing on pure raw tweets count is the intuitive notion that the more people talk about something, the larger is the probability it reflects their opinion and that their view can influence other people’s expectations,” the report said. Then the dataset was “cleaned” to delete advertisements or tweets that use the word inflation in an unrelated context.

In this way, for example, tweets such as “#Draghi: ‘We saved Europe from deflation.’ Do not count your chickens before they are hatched!” were kept, while others, such as “Only at Baby Glamour if you buy three items the least expensive is free. Promotional sales until October 10” were filtered out.

The remaining dataset was used to build two indices on expectations of increasing or decreasing inflation by measuring the daily volume of tweets containing previously selected word combinations such as “bargain price” or “very high price.”

“The fact that economic agents talk about expensive bills should reflect expectations of higher inflation,” the report said. “On the other hand, people discussing declining oil prices should correspond to expectations of lower inflation.”

The final set of indicators was then created based on divergence between the two indices.

The authors said their work underscored the significance and policy implications of information contained on social networks but acknowledged further study was needed to interpret the data.

They also noted that there were a few cases of a Twitter-based indicator been thrown off course by a viral social media event, for example when the sale of an apartment for a record-breaking $236 million in 2014 led to a flurry of tweets containing variants of the phrase “more expensive.”

Granted, this was done by a large national bank over several years. Nonetheless, parameters or hashtags # can be created – or borrowed from common usage – to monitor thoughts in your microcosm to ascertain consumer opinions regarding prices or other issues in your marketplace. An original hashtag may not get many hits in the beginning but in time its appearance in Twittersphere will generate greater numbers. Borrowed ones may be immediately popular. You should also use Twitter reach services, such as Tweetreach.com, to gauge your estimated reach and exposure, and then read the senders’ opinions.

This won’t work without your daily attention. You, as the small business owner, must monitor the results on a daily basis to comprehend what’s going on.

For example, you are a baker and you own a bakery, here are some possible hashtags in your business that you could track: #baking #bakingisfun #bakersgonnabake #instabaking #lovebaking #instabake #lovetobake #bakersofinstagram #bakinglove #bakingfromscratch #bakery #baker #cake #cookies #dough #sweet #pastry #confectionery #bakeshop #patisserie #tortes #pie #applepie and so on. For ideas, you can Google for hashtags in your business. Don’t forget to add your signature baking creation and your town.

As you’re waiting to open your business safely, take some time to compose your own business hashtags.

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