Customer Engagement with Food Companies' Tweets: An Investigation of Food Claims and Innovation

Abstract

As the internet creates platforms for online communication, people start to share their thoughts and attitudes about products on social media platforms, either by commenting or by giving likes to the posts. Given the opportunities of possible conversations between the companies and consumers on social media, companies have been interacting with customers on social medias as a marketing strategy. One well-known social media platform used by many scholars to conduct sentiment analyses of consumers within food sectors is Twitter. In this paper, I study consumers’ attitudes towards food companies’ tweets analyzing Twitter data from 2019 to 2020. Concepts relating to ‘innovation’ and food claims are captured using keyword-based analyses. The sentiment analysis is lexicon based, using a lexicon that is specifically designed for social media data. Hypotheses are tested using negative binomial regressions, separately on the 2019 and 2020 data sets. This study shows that both innovation and food claim concepts appear in posts on twitter. Whereas innovation tweets are consistently related to larger numbers of likes, the association of food claims with likes varies.