Social media sentiment analysis of consumer purchasing behavior vs consumer confidence index

The immense popularity of big data of social media opens the door for the consumer to express their opinions and views on a wide range of topics like state of economy, disappointment over certain products or services, or express their happiness of making purchases. Sentiments of social media data can be created almost in real time and at less costly rate which is not possible in the case of technique used for consumer confidence index (CCI). CCI is based on structured questionnaire which restrict the respondents into specific domain which is unlike sentiments through social media where people can express their honest and uninfluenced opinions. Furthermore sentiments acquired from social media can reflect consumer confidence representation of large population than traditional methods. With abovementioned advantages of social media data over traditional methods, this study investigates the relationship of social media driven sentiment analysis and CCI. Our results can be inferred as social media can offer huge data that can be integrated to current methods in synergistic way to better predicate consumer confidence index using far larger populations.