Analysis of Systematic Data Mining Approaches for Achieving Competitive Advantage by Monitoring Social Media

Abstract

This research paper mainly focuses at clarifying how and why social media monitoring is carried out to achieve competitive advantage. A systematic literature review was used to find current insights on the methods used, and so illustrate not only the benefits but also the difficulties that may arise during the monitoring process. Companies use social media to improve their business. More and more companies nowadays use social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, linked in, you tube, Google+ etc. not only for the purpose of service providing, but also to get in contact with customers.. Resulting this, a large amount of user-generated content is freely available on social media sites which is being utilized by business stakeholders. To increase competitive advantage and critically evaluate the competitive environment of businesses, companies are in need of monitoring and analysing not only the customergenerated content in the company’s social media sites, but also the information on their competitors’ social media sites as well as the customers. In an effort to aid firms understand how to perform a social media monitoring for achieving competitive advantage and convert data from social media into knowledge that will aid decision making. This review paper also describes an in-detail how text mining provides a way to analyse unstructured text content on social media sites. The results shows the value of social media and the advantages of text mining as an effective way to gain business value from social media data available in plenty. Moreover over, some recommendations are also given in this paper that aid business firms to develop competitive strategy.