Journal of Computer Information Systems

ISSN: 0887-4417 (Print) 2380-2057 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ucis20

Actionable Social Media Competitive Analytics For

Understanding Customer Experiences

Wu He, Xin Tian, Yong Chen & Dazhi Chong

To cite this article: Wu He, Xin Tian, Yong Chen & Dazhi Chong (2016) Actionable Social
Media Competitive Analytics For Understanding Customer Experiences, Journal of Computer
Information Systems, 56:2, 145-155

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08874417.2016.1117377

Published online: 15 Jan 2016.

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 ACTIONABLE SOCIAL MEDIA COMPETITIVE
ANALYTICS FOR UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER
EXPERIENCES
WU HE
Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529,
USA
YONG CHEN
Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529,
USA
ABSTRACT
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A large amount of user-generated content is now freely available
on social media sites. To increase their competitive advantage,
companies need to monitor and analyze not only the customer-
generated content on their own social media sites, but also the
content on their competitors’ social media sites. In this article,
we describe a framework to integrate several techniques
including quantitative analysis, text mining, and sentiment
analysis for analyzing and comparing social media content
from business competitors. Specifically, we conducted an in-
depth case study which applies our developed framework to
the analysis and comparison of social media content on the
Facebook sites of the three largest drugstore chains in the
United States: Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid. We found
similarities and differences in the social media use among the
three drugstore chains. We discuss the implications of our
findings and provide recommendations to help companies
develop their social media competitive analysis strategies.
Keywords: Social media, text mining, sentiment analysis,
business intelligence, competitive intelligence, competitive
analytics
INTRODUCTION
More and more customers use social media sites to express
opinions, feelings, and concerns about the services and products
they have purchased. Customers’ conversations on social media
sites can help us learn about their purchasing behaviors and shop-
ping experiences and can provide valuable knowledge to help
businesses improve their marketing and customer service. He,
Zha, and Li [23] suggest that businesses leverage and analyze a
wealth of textual data on social media to reveal hidden knowledge
and insights to gain a competitive edge. However, analyzing social
media content can be challenging and very time-consuming [47].
The rapid growth of social media content demands the use of
automatic social media analytic techniques. Furthermore, since
competitive intelligence is an important factor for businesses to
use in managing risks and making decisions [52], there is a need for
businesses to monitor not only their own social media sites but also
their competitors’ social media sites. Successful businesses need to
develop the capability to process all available information (e.g.,
customers’ opinions, product prices from competitors, reviews of
services and products), identify what has happened, and predict
what may happen later. Studies indicate that businesses that can
harness data analytics significantly outperform their peers on the
key business metrics of growth, earnings, and performance [65].
With the wide adoption of social media by businesses, the large
Volume 56 Issue 2, Spring 2016 Journal of Computer Information Systems
XIN TIAN
Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529,
USA
DAZHI CHONG
Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529,
USA
amount of customer-generated content on social media sites has
become a new source of mining competitive intelligence [59]. In
addition to extracting data from social media sites, businesses need
to be able to quickly make sense of the data to provide information
that is relevant, and actionable. By understanding what people
think about their company, products, and services, companies can
act quickly and compete more effectively. Furthermore, corporate
employees can transform what they have learned from social media
data analytics into action to deliver real business results or to guide
the development of better products and services [26]. Thus, busi-
nesses are increasingly expected to harness this user-generated
social media content to create a competitive advantage in order to
excel in the business environment [14]. In this article, we devel-
oped a framework to integrate several techniques including quan-
titative analysis, text mining, and sentiment analysis to analyze and
compare social media content from business competitors. In an
effort to help businesses understand how to perform actionable
social media analytics and how to transform social media content
into strategically actionable knowledge, we conducted an in-depth
case study which applies our developed framework to analyze and
compare unstructured text content on the Facebook sites of the
three largest drugstore chains in the United States: Walgreens,
CVS, and Rite Aid. We focused on comparing their Facebook
posts to understand the issues and problems with customers’ shop-
ping experiences.
The remainder of the article is organized as follows: Section
2 provides a review of social media and social media competi-
tive analytics. Section 3 proposes a framework for using social
media competitive analytics to analyze and compare social
media content from competing organizations. Section 4 presents
an in-depth case study of the three largest drugstore chains in the
United States. Section 5 discusses the findings. Section 6 pro-
vides managerial implications and insights. Section 7 notes
conclusions and suggestions for future research.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Social Media
Social media generally refers to online communication plat-
forms including websites and web applications used for social
networking, photo and video sharing, blogging, etc. [17, 51].
Compared to traditional media, social media allows businesses
to easily create online communities and utilize a two-way parti-
cipatory media model, rather than the traditional one-way broad-
cast media model, to communicate with customers [62].
145
 Common types of social media include collaborative projects
(e.g., Wikipedia), blogs and microblogs (e.g., Twitter), content
communities (e.g., YouTube), social networking (e.g.,
Facebook), virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds [29].
Among various social media networks, Facebook is the most
popular in terms of its network traffic and has been widely used
by businesses to engage customers and to influence and track
consumer beliefs and attitudes [23, 58].
Social media tools present unparalleled opportunities for
businesses. Radick [45] found that social media has been
“instrumental in promoting consumer awareness and providing
access to vast amounts of information, which impact decision-
making processes.” As social media can reach a large audience
at a low cost [24, 29], they are excellent vehicles for businesses
to access markets, to communicate with customers [25], to foster
stronger relationships with customers [13, 55], and to facilitate
brand communities [29, 31]. On the social media platform,
businesses are able to develop new approaches to rapidly dis-
seminate information[4, 27], learn customer perceptions of new
product offerings and competitive actions, and maximize oppor-
tunities to attract and collaborate with loyal customers [20, 38],
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influence customers’ evaluations and actions [40], and cultivate
loyal customers [38].
Social Media Competitive Analytics
In order to achieve competitive advantage, it is important for
businesses to constantly collect and analyze information about
their competitors’ products, services, and plans [23, 59].
Traditionally, companies mainly collect information about com-
petitors from marketing reports, trade journals, newspaper arti-
cles, and competitors’ websites. However, most of the
information is secondary information whose objectivity can be
questionable and the amount of such information is typically
limited [59]. Since social media has been used by many busi-
nesses to interact with customers, it is necessary for companies
to monitor their own and their competitors’ social media sites.
As the market competition among big brands is becoming
increasingly fierce, it is of great importance for large companies
to identify critical situations or moves by their competitors at an
early stage so that they are in a position to initiate counteractive
marketing measures [28]. This is especially critical for a com-
pany when its competitors use a new promotional technique and
customers express negative opinions about their products or
services through social media. For example, Coombs [9] found
that the diffusion of negative opinions poses a reputational and
financial threat and can harm the company’s image and future
sales volume. On the other hand, Dey, Haque, Khurdiya, and
Shroff [14] found that social media not only provide competitors
information but also provide direct comparison of customer
behaviors with respect to different verticals among competing
organizations. Customers often compare several competitive
products with similar functions and share their opinions and
sentiments on social media. These comparison opinions have
large impact on other customers’ purchasing behaviors and thus
need to be constantly collected and analyzed by businesses to
identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of their products
or services, to analyze the potential business risk and threats
from competitors, and to further develop corresponding business
strategies or tactics [59]. In summary, it is crucial for companies
to develop social media competitive analytics skills so that they
can get prompt feedback and can generate daily/weekly/monthly
analytic reports for quicker strategy changes that allow them to
work more effectively to attract and retain customers [19, 22].
However, a recent literature review reveals that there are only a
few studies that use social media competitive analytics in busi-
ness although a lot of research has been devoted to analyzing the
146 Journal of Computer Information Systems
data presented in social media [16, 44]. He, Zha, and Li [23]
applied a social media competitive analytics approach to analyze
unstructured text content on the Facebook and Twitter sites of
the three largest US pizza chains: Pizza Hut, Domino’s Pizza,
and Papa John’s Pizza. Their results reveal the value of social
media competitive analysis and the power of text mining as an
effective technique to extract business value from social media
content. Dey, Haque, Khurdiya, and Shroff [14] used text mining
to gather competitive intelligence about competing products and
companies. They found that social media data can be used to
derive competitive intelligence and to study the correlation of
rival brand promotion events on sales data and consumer
sentiment.
Many techniques can be used to conduct social media com-
petitive analytics. For instance, a combination of traditional
statistical analysis, content analysis, text mining, and sentiment
analysis techniques can be used to examine the social media
content collected from competing organizations’ social media
sites in order to gain insights and compare customers’ experi-
ences and sentiments.
As an emerging technology, text mining aims to extract
meaningful information from unstructured textual data [23,
36]. The main purpose of text mining is to automatically extract
knowledge, insights, and useful patterns or trends from a given
set of text documents [64]. Text mining techniques have been
used to analyze large amounts of social media data. Chen,
Vorvoreanu, and Madhavan [8] mined students’ informal con-
versations on social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) to under-
stand students’ educational experiences, including their
opinions, feelings, and concerns about the learning process.
Corley et al. [10] used text mining to identify trends in posts
about the flu that correlate to real-world influenza-like illness
patient report data. Key text mining techniques include cluster
analysis, categorization, information extraction (text summariza-
tion), and link analysis [64]. In particular, cluster analysis is a
key application of text mining and includes four main building
blocks: feature selection, the clustering algorithm, validation of
the results, and interpretation of the results [18]. By dividing a
population into clusters which are different from one another
(maximal distance between clusters) but whose members are
similar (minimal distance within each cluster), cluster analysis
can enhance the understandability of datasets and can support
effective decision-making [30]. Currently, there are a wide range
of tools that can be used for text mining and analytics, such as
the IBM SPSS Modeler (formerly Clementine), Leximancer,
Clarabridge, and the SAS Enterprise Miner.
Sentiment analysis is the computational detection and study of
opinions, sentiments, emotions, and subjectivities in text [34, 35,
42]. As a special application of text mining, sentiment analysis is
concerned with the automatic extraction of positive or negative
opinions from text [42]. Since texts often contain a mix of positive
and negative sentiment, sentiment analysis is often useful to
identify the polarity of sentiment in text (positive, negative, or
neutral) and even the strength of sentiment expressed [42, 54].
Sentiment analysis relies mainly on machine learning techniques
such as support vector machine (SVM) and naive Bayes to clas-
sify texts into positive or negative categories [34, 43]. In the
business field, sentiment analysis makes it easier for companies
to mine customer opinions on products or companies through their
reviews or online posts, so it has been widely used in marketing
and customer relationship management. Bollen et al. [3] used
sentiment analysis to mine a large corpus of Twitter messages to
determine the mood of the Twitter population on a given day.
They found that the mood of the Twitter population was able to
predict the movement of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA)
on the following day with a claimed 87.6% accuracy. Duan, Cao,
Yu, and Levy [15] used sentiment analysis to mine 70,103 online
Volume 56 Issue 2, Spring 2016
 user reviews posted in various online venues from 1999 to 2011
for 86 hotels in the Washington D.C. area. Stieglitz and Dang-
Xuan [50] examined whether sentiment occurring in Wall posts on
public political Facebook pages had an effect on feedback in terms
of the quantity of triggered comments in the political domain.
Stieglitz and Dang-Xuan [49] also used a sentiment analysis tool
called SentiStrength [54] to analyze two datasets of more than
165,000 tweets and found that emotionally charged Twitter mes-
sages tend to be retweeted more often and more quickly, compared
to neutral ones.
A FRAMEWORK FOR CONDUCTING SOCIAL MEDIA
COMPETITIVE ANALYTICS
Figure 1 illustrates a framework that includes some possible
approaches (traditional statistical analysis, content analysis, text
mining, sentiment analysis, social network analysis) for con-
ducting data-intensive research on social media competitive
analytics. The framework considers methodological approaches
from a variety of disciplines such as computer science, statistics,
and computational linguistics, as well as from social science. A
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variety of algorithms and methods such as text classification,
n-gram, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis [7, 64] can be
used to support and implement these approaches. Additional
analytics methods and mining algorithms can be added to this
framework as technology evolves.
Data from social media sites can be gathered in a number
of ways. The most straightforward way is to use web-crawl-
ing software to access the web interface of the site. Currently,
many social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and
YouTube offer application programming interfaces (APIs)
for data tracking. These APIs allow organizations to create
custom applications for more convenient data collection. In
contrast, blogs and online forums typically do not provide
APIs for data tracking. However, most blogs and online for-
ums do offer RSS feeds which can be easily tracked. For
FIGURE 1. A Framework for Conducting Social Media Competitive Analytics
Volume 56 Issue 2, Spring 2016 Journal of Computer Information Systems
those without an RSS function, manual copying or web-
crawling techniques such as HTML parsing can be used
to collect data as well, although they may be more time-
consuming [50]. As more social media platforms are provid-
ing APIs for accessing their content, gathering large amounts
of data from social media sources will become easier over
time. A few social media data collection and gathering tools
or applications such as NVivo’s NCapture, X1 Social
Discovery, and IBM Social Media Capture 4 have also been
developed in recent years to facilitate data gathering from
various social media platforms.
The data gathered from social media sites will then be
stored in a back-end repository for subsequent analysis. Since
companies can remove information on their social media sites,
there is a need to store longitudinal social media data in the
repository. The framework can be used to facilitate the con-
struction of a social media data repository for managing het-
erogeneous longitudinal social media data from competitors.
Based on this framework, social media monitoring and analy-
tics software systems can be further developed [48] to collect,
store, and analyze data by conducting continuous longitudinal
monitoring and analysis of all known social media sites from
target business competitors. Competitive intelligence reports
for each competitor can be generated on a daily, weekly, or
monthly basis to provide actionable insights into critical busi-
ness functions such as supply chain, customer service, and
marketing. For example, by comparing customer comments
and sentiments about a particular competing product, a com-
pany could make its marketing strategies more precise, agile,
and responsive to consumer demands and thereby increase its
sales potential. Based on an understanding of the patterns,
trends, issues, and problems reflected in social media content,
companies can make more informed recommendations and
decisions on proper interventions and services that can improve
the customer experience and can help achieve better business
outcomes for the immediate future [52].
147
 A CASE STUDY
Research Questions
This case study examines the Facebook sites of three largest
drugstore chains in the United States and applies a social media
competitive analytics approach to analyze unstructured text con-
tent on their Facebook sites. We analyze the content shared on
their Facebook sites in terms of topics, categories, and shared
sentiment. Specifically, the study attempts to answer the follow-
ing two questions:
• What patterns can be found from their Facebook sites?
• What are the main differences in their Facebook patterns?
Methodology
Context of the Study
The retail pharmacy industry is highly competitive.
Numerous pharmacies and drug stores use social media both to
connect with their consumer bases and to attract new customers.
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In addition to selling prescription and over-the-counter (OTC)
medications, many pharmacies and drug stores in the United
States also provide other services and sell products including
cosmetics, tobacco, consumables, stationery, household items,
and the like. Currently, there are approximately 67,000 pharma-
cies in the United States. Many of these pharmacies and drug
stores aggressively market on the Internet to capture market
share. Popular social media applications used by drugstores
include Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Among them,
Facebook is the most popular social media application used by
the drugstore chains. Since pharmacies and drugstores have a
large social media user base, and so far there is little research
that investigates how large drugstore chains are using social
media to support their business, we conducted our social
media competitive analysis with the three largest drugstore
chains in the United States: Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid.
Currently, by pharmacy count, Walgreens is the largest, CVS
is the second largest, and Rite Aid is the third largest drug
retailing chain in the United States.
Procedures
To answer the research questions, we followed the proposed
framework listed in Figure 1 to conduct our social media com-
petitive analysis. First, we collected quantitative data manually
from the chains’ individual Facebook sites, such as the number
of fans/followers, the number of postings, comments, shares,
and likes, and the frequency of posting. Our data analysis mainly
focuses on the information posted on their Facebook sites during
June 2013. Next, we applied several analytics methods including
statistical analysis, text mining, and sentiment analysis to ana-
lyze the gathered text messages in order to discover business
insights, new knowledge, and patterns and to acquire a deeper
understanding of how the three drug chains are using social
media in practice. Our study used the posts collected between
June 1 and June 30, 2013, as the sample for analytics. All of the
posts and comments were saved into Excel Spreadsheets for
competitive analysis.
Case study relies on multiple sources of evidence with data
needing to converge in a triangulating fashion [63]. The data
analysis in this case study was done by using both qualitative
and quantitative data. We first used statistical analysis including
descriptive analysis and correlation analysis to examine the
relationships among the numerical data we collected from the
drugstore chains’ social media sites. We then used a text mining
tool and a sentiment analysis tool to mine and analyze the
148 Journal of Computer Information Systems
textual content in order to discover categories and insights and
to understand any potential patterns or issues. In this case study,
we chose to use Leximancer (www.leximancer.com) as the text
mining tool. As a popular text mining tool, Leximancer has a
very easy-to-use interface; it has been used by many researchers
to analyze the content of collections of textual documents [6, 12]
(Campbell, Pitt, Parent, & Berthon, 2011; Dann, 2010). For
example, Martin and Rice [37] used it to analyze a collection
of textual statements gathered from government web pages in
order to identify the major issues and areas of concern of
computer users and organizations that had borne an exposure
to cybercrime.
Sentiment analysis is often used to monitor brand reputation
[39] and to help companies understand the perception that cus-
tomers have about their products or services. To conduct senti-
ment analysis, we used a highly popular program named
SentiStrength (http://sentistrength.wlv.ac.uk/) to measure the
intensity of positive, negative, and neutral sentiment in each
comment from social media users [49, 50]. A group of four
researchers reviewed the text mining and sentiment analysis
results carefully to identify patterns, to discuss and interpret
the findings, and to come up with recommendations and
insights. We had several rounds of evaluation and discussion
of the generated results to develop and refine our findings.
Findings
Results of Quantitative Analysis on Facebook Content. We
collected quantitative data, such as number of fans/followers,
number of postings, comments and likes, frequency of posting,
posting, and response time, manually from each chain’s indi-
vidual Facebook site. In our analysis of the Facebook data
gathered for the month of June 2013, we focused on compar-
ing the level of engagement on their Facebook sites. Figures
2–4 show the customer engagement levels for Walgreens,
CVS, and Rite Aid in June 2013. As Dey, Haque, Khurdiya,
and Shroff [14] indicate, social media data can be an indicator
of brand popularity. In the three Figures and in Table 1, we
note that Walgreens, the largest drugstore chain, typically had
a higher level of engagement than its two competitors, in
terms of likes, comments, and shares from customers. This
result correlates well with the number of likes it had, since
Walgreens had many more likes than its competitors. We also
identified spikes from Figures 2–4 and examined the posts
from the dates of the spikes to see what might have caused
them. We found that these spikes were mainly caused by
holidays or by promotional sales as well as by special events.
For example, since June 16 was Father’s Day in 2013, we
found a relatively higher level of engagement during that
weekend, which led to a spike in the number of likes and
comments.
Table 1 lists the total number of likes, shares, comments, and
posts for each drugstore chain received in June 2013.
Figure 5 compares the number of daily posts among the three
drugstore chains in June 2013.
We found that Walgreens posted approximately two mes-
sages on average per day, Rite Aid posted 1.5 messages on
average, and CVS posted about one message per day.
Compared to CVS and Rite Aid, Walgreens seemed more active
in engaging and interacting with customers. Based on the data
shown in Table 1, we conducted a correlation analysis. A finding
observed is that the frequency of post activity was positively
correlated to number of likes (r = 0.755), shares (r = 0.838), and
comments (r = 0.576). This indicates that active posting on
Facebook is likely to engage more customers or to attract the
attention of more customers.
Volume 56 Issue 2, Spring 2016
 8000 TABLE 1. Number of Likes, Shares, Comments, and Posts
for Each Drugstore Chain Received in June 2013
7000

6000
Drugstore Like Share Comments Post
Walgreens 60,976 10,895 3642 64
5000 CVS 12,039 994 1732 28
4000 Like Rite Aid 9270 1807 879 50
Comments
3000
Share
2000 7

1000 6

0
2013/6/1
2013/6/3
2013/6/5
2013/6/7
2013/6/9
2013/6/11
2013/6/13
2013/6/15
2013/6/17
2013/6/19
2013/6/21
2013/6/23
2013/6/25
2013/6/27
2013/6/29
5

4
CVS
FIGURE 2. Walgreens’ Customer Engagement Trend in 3 Walgreens
June 2013 Rite Aid
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1800 1
1600
0
1400

2013/6/1
2013/6/3
2013/6/5
2013/6/7
2013/6/9
2013/6/11
2013/6/13
2013/6/15
2013/6/17
2013/6/19
2013/6/21
2013/6/23
2013/6/25
2013/6/27
2013/6/29
1200

1000
Like
800 FIGURE 5. A Comparison of Daily Posts Among the Three
Comments
600 Drugstore Chains in June 2013
Share
400

200
The results show that the number of people who liked the
0
pages showed a strong correlation with the number of people
2013/6/1
2013/6/3
2013/6/5
2013/6/7
2013/6/9
2013/6/11
2013/6/13
2013/6/15
2013/6/17
2013/6/19
2013/6/21
2013/6/23
2013/6/25
2013/6/27
2013/6/29

commenting on Facebook pages in the past seven days (rs =

0.916); the number of people who liked the pages also had strong
correlation with the number of people who visited the place(store)
FIGURE 3. CVS’ Customer Engagement Trend in June (rs = 1); and the number of people commenting on the Facebook
2013 pages in the past seven days had a strong correlation with the
number of people who visited the place(store) (rs = 1). This
indicates that a drugstore that has more fans, and a higher level
1200
of engagement on Facebook is likely to attract more potential
customers to visit its physical stores.
1000 The results also reveal that the year when a drugstore joined
Facebook had a strong relationship with both the number of
800

600 Like
TABLE 2. Total Number of Likes, Number of People Talking
400 Comments about it, Number of People Who Were there, and the Facebook
Share Starting Date for These Drugstore Chains as of April 13, 2014
200
Number of
0
Number of people
2013/6/2
2013/6/4
2013/6/6
2013/6/8
2013/6/10
2013/6/12
2013/6/14
2013/6/16
2013/6/18
2013/6/20
2013/6/22
2013/6/24
2013/6/26
2013/6/28
2013/6/30

people who were

talking about there Facebook
it (in the past (place starting
FIGURE 4. Rite Aid’s Customer Engagement Trend in June Drugstore Likes seven days) feature) Date
2013 Walgreens 4,265,248 37,981 991,654 August
19, 2009
CVS 1,323,578 15,065 115,732 June 12,
Table 2 lists the latest number of likes, the number of people 2009
talking about it (in the past seven days), number of people who Rite Aid 677,362 20,818 N/A April 4,
were there (place feature), and the Facebook starting date for
2010
each of these drugstore chains as of April 13, 2014.

Volume 56 Issue 2, Spring 2016 Journal of Computer Information Systems 149

 TABLE 3. Facebook Post Categories Among Rite Aid, CVS, and Walgreens
CVS Walgreens Rite Aid
Post categories Number of posts Post categories Number of posts Post categories Number of posts
Customer Survey 16 Customer Survey 7 Customer Survey 27
New Service 2 New Service 2 New Service 2
Special Offer 9 Special Offer 26 Special Offer 9
Others 1 Advertisement 13 Advertisement 2
Tips 9 Tips 3
Others 7 Store-related news 3
Others 4
Total 28 Total 64 Total 50

likes (rs = 0.639) and the number of people commenting on services, or information about free items, are relatively less pop-
Facebook pages in the past seven days (rs = 0.276). In other ular and do not attract many comments or likes (in most cases).
words, a drugstore with an earlier Facebook setup tends to
attract more Facebook users who “like” the drugstore and who Results of Text Mining. After applying the Leximancer soft-
comment on its Facebook pages than those with a later ware to conduct an automatic analysis of the Facebook comments
Facebook setup. This indicates that those drugstores that joined
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(6253 comments in total), we examined the generated maps care-

Facebook earlier tend to have more Facebook fans, which typi-
cally leads to more comments on their Facebook pages.
We manually analyzed the original Facebook posts made by
each drugstore chain. Table 3 lists the distribution of Facebook
post categories among Rite Aid, CVS, and Walgreens. We found
that the three drugstore chains mainly use Facebook to survey
customers for learning their interests or opinions on certain events,
to announce new services, sales or special offers, or to providing
tips, etc. The focuses of the Facebook posts are different among
Rite Aid, CVS, and Walgreens. Customer survey contributes to
57.1% of CVS posts and 54% of Rite Aid posts in Rite Aid.
Compared with the other two drugstores, Walgreens posted more
special offers, which accounted for 40.6% of all of its posts. Unlike
CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid use a variety of approaches to
promote their products and services. For instance, advertisements
and tips account for 34.3% of all of Walgreens’ Facebook posts.
Content-wise, we found that the funny pictures with animals
were the most popular posts among all posts on the drugstore
chain’s Facebook sites and typically led to a high level of engage-
ment. Many people left comments and liked/shared such posts. In
addition, the open-ended survey questions seemed an effective
way to engage customers and to attract more people to leave
comments/to answer the questions. Some of the survey questions
had over 150 comments. Other posts, such as discounts, new
fully. Leximancer produced several concept maps that contain the
extracted concepts and their interrelationships. Each concept map
contains the names of the main concepts that occur within the text.
Figure 6 shows an example of the concept maps generated for CVS,
Rite Aid, and Walgreens, respectively. The map uses large circles to
represent key themes, uses dots to represent concepts, and uses
brighter color and larger theme circles and concept dots to indicate
greater importance within the text [6, 33]. The themes in
Leximancer are heat-mapped to indicate importance. According to
a predefined color scheme, Leximancer displays the most important
theme in red, and the second important in orange, and so on. In
general, concepts that are strongly semantically linked will be close
to each other and will form clusters [37, 46]. Figure 7 shows some
of the key words identified by Leximancer include pharmacy,
experience, service, member, love, care, discount, coupon, etc.
Since we are mainly interested in the overall patterns of the
customer comments, we further combined the comments of the
three drugstores and did a text mining operation. We reviewed the
generated concept terms and themes carefully and, since the soft-
ware also allowed us to go deeper and look at the original posts
related to those concept terms for more details, we held an in-depth
discussion on clusters. We manually examined the original posts,
related the concept terms in the dataset, and then discussed what
clusters they should be placed into based on the meaning of each

Concept map generated from Concept map generated from Concept map generated from

CVS data Rite Aid data Walgreens data

FIGURE 6. Generated Concept Maps

150 Journal of Computer Information Systems Volume 56 Issue 2, Spring 2016

Downloaded by [Penn State University] at 11:58 21 January 2016

FIGURE 7. Concept Map Generated from All Customer Comments

TABLE 4. Categories Related to Customer Comments

Categories
Suggestions for products or services
Customer’s questions for
Facebook customers
Customers’ compliments
Customers’ complaints
Customers’ responses or suggestions
to other customers
Drugstores’ Facebook response to
customer comments
Examples (Quotes from Facebook Users)
● We were at the pharmacy today & don’t u think a hour wait with kids is a bit too much? . . ...
U guys gotta hire more people.
● From the last time you guys updated the android app in March, the coupon feature stopped
working. Can you guys please fix that?
other ● How much did u pay for tax?
● Has anyone tried these? Do they work?
● Do you take both, or just pick which applies to you more?
● I just wanted to say my CVS is great!
● CVS is the best for coupons.
● I have had the worst experiences with XX pharmacy. Will never use them again.
● I received an email with coupon links that don’t work, will you please look into this
● I was told it would take 45 minutes to fill the prescription its a long time.
● You CAN add coupon to your card when you log on to CVS.com. When you place your card
info your allowed to put all of the coupons on your card which will come off when you make
your purchase.
● I put my cvs coupons in my purse so I don’t forget to use them.
● To best protect your skin from the sun, you should choose a sunscreen that has an SPF of 15
or higher.
● Rite Aid: We apologize if you’ve experienced any issues when attempting to visit the link
provided in our post. This technical issue has since been resolved.
● Rite Aid: We do not tolerate the harassment of individuals, so any comments that disparage
an individual by name or a specific entry will be removed from the page.
● Walgreens: I am sorry to hear this. I will certainly follow up on your issue to get you a
resolution as soon as possible.
● Walgreens: I’m so sorry that happened and I completely understand your concerns. Please
Private Message me so that I can get more details to address your concerns.
● Walgreens: Please email us directly at walgreenscares@walgreens.com.

Volume 56 Issue 2, Spring 2016 Journal of Computer Information Systems 151

 post. As a result of the repetitive comparison, contrast, and discus-
sion, we finalized a few major clusters and collectively decided a
descriptive name for each of the clusters. We went through several
iterations to finalize the clusters/concept terms and their labels.
In summary, based on the text mining results, we classified
the 6253 comments posted by the drugstore chains’ customers
on Facebook during June 2013, as well as the responses to
customer comments from the drugstores, into five major cate-
gories (see Table 4).
Results of Sentiment Analysis. Table 5–7 list the sentiment
analysis results we derived by using SentiStrength for the
Facebook comments of Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid, respec-
tively. By comparing consumer sentiments based on the custo-
mer comments we collected from the three drugstore chains’
Facebook sites, we found that Rite Aid received a relatively
higher percentage of positive comments and a lower percentage
of negative comments from their customers than did CVS and
Walgreens.
The comments of customers reflect the customers’ personal
opinions, perceptions, and preferences. Different customers
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● I am so ecstatic about the rewards program at rite aid, i
save so much money! I should have done it a long time
ago. And I must say the service I receive at my Rite Aid
is beyond exceptional.
● Dr XX is very good and reasonable.
● Just want to say how much I love my rite aid. My
pharmacist is awesome!!!
Below are some quotes of negative comments:
● The pharmacy department is inept and rude.
● One of your pharmacies gave me the wrong medication
● The pharmacy in XX is horrible with the wait there
DISCUSSION
Social media allow firms to engage consumers at a rela-
tively low cost and with higher levels of efficiency [29].
Businesses can develop relationships with customers through
repeated interactions with them on Facebook [56]. However,
an effective use of social media for business purposes is not
always easy. Businesses may wonder how often they should

post on Facebook. Too many Facebook posts may annoy

often have different experiences regarding the same type of customers and may drive customers away; too few postings
services due to their different experiences in different stores. may lead to a low level of engagement on Facebook. A
For example, some customers complained that they waited too commonly recommended practice for businesses is to have
long at the pharmacy. Other customers reported that they love one-to-two posts on Facebook per day, which is suggested to
their pharmacy because the service that they received was fast, be more effective than fewer or more posts per day [1]. Our
they found good deals and had great savings, the pharmacy staff case study shows that the three drugstores are following this
was friendly to them, and so on. recommended practice and usually post one to two messages
Below are some quotes of positive comments: per day. Based on the number of likes, shares, and comments
● They call we when my pills are ready and when I ask they received during June 2013, we can see that their social
them a question they answer it and they are friendly. media practices were fairly effective in terms of engaging
their customer bases.
Many businesses also wonder what kind of a message will
attract and engage customers on social media. In our case study,
we found that the content of the post plays a critical role in
TABLE 5. Sentiment Analysis Results for Walgreens
terms of engaging customers. We observed that those drugstore
Occurrence Percentage Percentage chains that offered visually appealing posts with pictures and
survey questions got more engagement and attracted more com-
Sentiment s (all) (all) (sentiment only)
ments, likes, and shares. For example, the open-ended survey
Positive 333 32.80 75.70 questions received more comments than posts related to sales or
Negative 107 10.5 24.30 to promotional announcements. In terms of designing the open-
Neutral 574 56.70 ended survey questions, we found that the three drugstores
TOTAL 1014 100 100 tended to ask questions that reflected current popular events
like Father’s Day, summer vacation, etc. These posts could
allow the customer to feel that the drugstore cared about its
customers’ interests on a personal level and was willing to take
TABLE 6. Sentiment Analysis Results for CVS the time to learn about and communicate with its customers. As
a result, these posts could bring those customers closer to the
Occurrence Percentage Percentage business and increase their loyalty.
Sentiment s (all) (all) (sentiment only) Instead of passively receiving information sent by busi-
Positive 167 30.30 70.20 nesses [21], customers can also use social media for their
Negative 71 12.90 29.80 own benefit [53]. The comments posted by customers reflect
Neutral 313 56.80 their opinions, perceptions, and preferences. These comments,
TOTAL 551 100 100 at first, were responses to the original posts from the drug-
stores. Subsequently, some customers had further discussions
and exchanged opinions and experiences among them. They
also often compared the drugstore with other drugstores in their
TABLE 7. Sentiment Analysis Results for Rite Aid comments and offered tips to other customers. We also noticed
that a few customers (ranging from 4.9% to 12.9%) made
Occurrence Percentage Percentage negative comments and aired complaints about their experience
Sentiment s (all) (all) (sentiment only) with the services they had been given by the drugstores.
Positive 229 34.80 87.70 O’Brien and Marakas [41] indicate that 70% of complaining
customers will do business with the company again if their
Negative 32 4.90 12.30
problems and concerns are quickly addressed. We noted in our
Neutral 396 60.30 study that when negative comments were posted, each of the
TOTAL 657 100 100 three drugstore chains made a good effort to minimize their
impact and posted their responses or solutions (e.g., giving

152 Journal of Computer Information Systems Volume 56 Issue 2, Spring 2016

 email or phone contact methods). Rite Aid and Walgreens were
very good at this and typically responded fairly quickly.
On the other hand, many customers use their comments to
provide suggestions to the drugstores or to express their opi-
nions. Instead of discussing the posts, some customers expand
topics to other fields. For instance, due to a controversy about
the use of a racial epithet, Walgreens announced that it was
going to cut ties with Paula Deen on June 28, 2013. This
announcement quickly resulted in a negative reaction from
customers on Facebook. We found quite a few negative com-
ments made on June 29, 2013. In particular, 16 out of 18
negative comments were related to this announcement. Since
negative word-of-mouth initiated by users is generally more
persuasive than most positive comments and can trigger bad
consequences [2], we recommend that businesses use proactive
methods to remediate the impact of negative comments on their
businesses. In particular, businesses need to monitor their
social media sites very closely, as social media are being
increasingly used by their customers. Furthermore, since cus-
tomers often compare services or products in the competitors’
social media sites, monitoring competitors’ social media sites is
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also crucial. By monitoring and analyzing the words posted by
their competitors’ customers, businesses can develop better
business intelligence and can use the knowledge they gain to
identify relative strengths and problems when comparing their
products and services with those of their competitors. However,
the social media monitoring and analyzing process can be very
challenging because of the huge amount of data created daily
on social media.
In summary, the case study shows how the social media
analytics results from three drug store chains can be used to
benefit their business relationship with their customers. In parti-
cular, social media analytics help a business to know more about
both its customers and its competitors’ customers. Therefore, use
of social media analytics can help a business develop a more
effective competitive benchmarking strategy in terms of compar-
ing customers’ sentiments about the services and products of a
particular company with sentiments about the same or similar
services and products offered by competitors. For example, the
comparison may identify some additional benefits or values that
were previously overlooked. The comparison may also identify
some consumer needs that have not been met by competitors [57]
or may help to identify potential risks as early as possible. Based
on the results of such a comparison, businesses can better under-
stand their strengths and weaknesses, can plan appropriate strate-
gies, and can create action plans to compete more effectively in
the marketplace [61].
IMPLICATIONS
The results of this study indicate that using and mining social
media data has value and can help businesses produce useful
intelligence. With the growing importance of social media in our
society, companies and customers are increasingly using social
media as a medium for communication. To help businesses more
effectively manage social media data, we recommend that interested
businesses adopt or adapt our proposed framework for conducting
social media competitive analytics. Below are some suggestions.
First, companies need to consider implementing a corporate
database system to capture, store, and manage the messages
posted on their social media sites and their main competitors’
social media sites, because implementation of competitive intel-
ligence requires the collection of information from both the
internal environment and the external environment. In practice,
many companies often fail to “scan the external environment to
which the companies are exposed, and fail to yield meaningful
intelligence” [60]. Since scanning the whole environment is
Volume 56 Issue 2, Spring 2016 Journal of Computer Information Systems
costly, companies have to decide from what channels they will
collect information. Since social media data are public and can
be easily accessed online, we believe that social media data, as a
valuable information source, should not be overlooked by those
companies who want to excel in the marketplace. Since postings
and comments on social media can be deleted by companies,
using a database to store longitudinal social media data is also
important. The longitudinal social media data stored in the
database can be used as supporting documentation or as evi-
dence for future decision-making, marketing campaign develop-
ment, or policy making.
Second, companies need to have a professional staff in place
to manage the social media data they collect, to integrate the
scattered social media records from different social media sites,
and to analyze the data in an efficient way. Existing business
intelligence tools, including data mining, text mining, sentiment
analysis, and statistical tools, should be used to expedite the data
analysis. There are a variety of ways to analyze the data, as this
case study shows. For example, the social media content they
collect can be classified by type of request, complaints, and
suggestion [62]. Social media content can also be classified by
sentiment including positive sentiment and negative sentiment.
Fisher and Miller [19] recommend that companies “obtain real
time snapshots of sentiment related to service, reaction to mes-
saging at different locations, for different demographics, from
different media outlets, and in a meaningful format.”
Third, companies need to provide managers, executives, and
other decision-makers with easy access to the data and the
results of the analytics. To gain a competitive advantage, it is
imperative for companies to use the data and analytics results to
quickly respond to changes. Query-and-reporting tools can be
provided to decision-makers who can then explore the data on
their own. Online analytical processing (OLAP) tools can be
provided to decision-makers to support them in their use of
common operations including slice and dice, drill down, roll
up, and pivot. Daily, weekly, or monthly reports can be sent to
decision-makers who can then turn the information into knowl-
edge for decision-making and other actions.
Finally, we need to point out that businesses need to pay
specific attention to the quality of the data when they use social
media data for decision-making. There are some concerns about
the quality and reliability of the data posted on social media. To
mediate such concerns, businesses need to integrate social media
data with other data such as their internal business data in order
to make well-informed decisions. Teo and Choo [52] found that
the quality of competitive intelligence information is positively
related to organizational impact. By integrating longitudinal
social media data with other data sources, companies can more
reliably determine trends in a way that provides more accurate
predictions that can be incorporated into decision-making and
policy development.
There are several limitations to this study. First, the
Facebook data were collected for only one month and thus the
conclusions should not be overgeneralized. Ideally, a longitudi-
nal study is needed to examine the Facebook data for an exten-
sive period of time to identify long-term trends of how
businesses like drugstores use social media for their business
development. Second, we did not interview drugstore managers,
employees, and customers directly to understand their social
media experience. For future research, it would be interesting
to interview them and to get their direct input on their social
media experience.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH
Business cannot afford to ignore social media data as the
competition in the marketplace intensifies. Businesses often
153
 have different perspectives on the use of social media tools.
Some businesses tend to use social media to broadcast sales
information, and some businesses tend to build relationships
with customers through social media. Our case study reveals
that the three largest drugstore chains in the United States have
used Facebook not only to provide information but also to build
relationships with their customers. By monitoring competitors’
social media sites, businesses can learn from each other ways to
enhance their social media usage and can detect new commer-
cial trends in developing marketing strategies and tactics [5].
Since many companies are not familiar with social media
analytics and are especially new to conducting competitive
intelligence using social media content [11], the authors propose
a novel actionable framework for conducting social media com-
petitive analytics, with which they conducted a case study to
illustrate how social media data can be transformed into knowl-
edge to guide businesses’ decision and action plans. This case
study makes a contribution by using several techniques to per-
form social media competitive analytics to review the user-
generated data on the Facebook sites of the three largest US
drugstore chains. The results of the case study show that the
Downloaded by [Penn State University] at 11:58 21 January 2016
proposed framework and the methods applied in the case study
are effective ways to perform social media competitive analyses.
Businesses should take necessary steps to leverage social media
data to complement their competitive intelligence strategies for
achieving better competitive advantage.
Our future research plan is to build a social media competitive
intelligence monitoring and analytics system, which can be custo-
mized to collect different types of data from social media. The
purpose of this system is to help companies identify relevant social
media content, including issues, complaints, and suggestions that,
with minimal effort in collection, may influence business decisions
or strategies. The social media data will be stored locally in a
large-scale database repository for generating weekly or monthly
competitive analysis reports for interested businesses. Businesses
can also combine the gathered social media data with other struc-
tured data such as sales data and stock prices to determine how
social media and competition influence their businesses.
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