Information School INF6000 Dissertation COVER SHEET (TURNITIN) Registration Number 160128947 Family Name Zhao First Name Pan Use of unfair means. It is the student's responsibility to ensure no aspect of their work is plagiarised or the result of other unfair means. The University’s and Information School’s advice on unfair means can be found in your Student Handbook, available via http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/is/current Assessment Word Count _____10893_____________. If your dissertation has a word count that is outside the range 10,000 – 15,000 words or if you do not state the word count then a deduction of 3 marks will be applied Late submission. A dissertation submitted after 10am on the stated submission date will result in a deduction of 5% of the mark awarded for each working day after the submission date/time up to a maximum of 5 working days, where ‘working day’ includes Monday to Friday (excluding public holidays) and runs from 10am to 10am. A dissertation submitted after the maximum period will receive zero marks. Ethics documentation should be included in the Appendix if your dissertation has been judged to be Low Risk or High Risk. R (Please tick the box if you have included the documentation) A deduction of 3 marks will be applied for a dissertation if the required ethics documentation is not included in the appendix; and the same deduction will be applied if your research data has not been available for inspection when required. The deduction procedures are detailed in the INF6000 Module Outline and Dissertation Handbook. Competitive Intelligence in Social Media Twitter : Huawei, OPPO and VIVO A study submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MSc Information Management at THE UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD by Pan Zhao September 2017 Abstract In this information age, social media has become a part of people's daily lives, it is an important way for people to communicate and socialize. With the development of social media, more and more information is generated from social media, these information contains a wealth of valuable information. Users through the social media to express their views, participate in corporate marketing activities, access to the required information. Enterprise can understand user’s needs and preferences through the behavior of users in social media and use that information to improve their products and services. For China's smart phone brands, they can get user feedback and advice from the social media through reasonable data collection and processing, and they can define competitors by comparing different products form different brands. In this study, three Chinese smart phone business as the research object, researcher analyzes the social media data of the three companies on Weibo, designs the reasonable data collection method and data analysis method, and finally proves the correlation between the social media data and the market performance, at same time, this study verify that this method is feasible. The three Chinese smart phone brand is Huawei, OPPO and VIVO, they are top 3 in China's smart phone market sales in 2016 ranked. The study uses Chinese Word Segmentation, text mining, Sentiment analysis and other technologies. Key word：social media，smart phone，Weibo，Chinese Word Segmentation, text mining, Sentiment analysis. Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................. 1 1. Introduction and context .......................................................................................................... 3 1.1 Introduction and context .................................................................................................... 3 1.2 Research aims and objectives ............................................................................................. 5 2. Literature review ....................................................................................................................... 6 2.1 social media ..................................................................................................................... 6 2.2 Social media platforms in China ....................................................................................... 8 2.3 Competitive Intelligence .................................................................................................. 9 2.3.1 Competitive Intelligence Process ........................................................................... 12 2.3.2 The Benefits of Competitive Intelligence ............................................................ 14 2.4 Social media in competitive intelligence........................................................................ 15 3. Methodology ........................................................................................................................... 17 3.1 Quantitative ................................................................................................................... 17 3.2 Data collection methods ................................................................................................ 18 3.3 Pre-processing Data ....................................................................................................... 23 3.4 Data analysis methods ................................................................................................... 26 3.4.1 Text Mining ............................................................................................................ 27 3.4.2 Sentiment analysis .............................................................................................. 28 3.5 Implementation process ................................................................................................ 34 3.5.1 Weibo Sentiment Polarity Analysis ..................................................................... 34 3.5.2 Purchase intention analysis ................................................................................ 36 3.6 Practicalities ................................................................................................................... 37 3.7 Ethical ............................................................................................................................. 38 4. Result and Finding ................................................................................................................... 39 4.1 Social media and Marketing ........................................................................................... 40 4.2 Text mining..................................................................................................................... 41 4.2.1 OPPO ................................................................................................................... 42 4.2.2 Huawei ................................................................................................................ 46 4.2.3 VIVO .................................................................................................................... 49 4.3 Weibo Sentiment Polarity Analysis ................................................................................ 52 4.4 Purchase Intention Analysis ........................................................................................... 53 4.5 Summary ........................................................................................................................ 55 5. Discussion ................................................................................................................................ 56 6. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 61 Reference ........................................................................................................................................ 64 Appendix ......................................................................................................................................... 70 1. Introduction and context 1.1 Introduction and context With the rapid development of social media in recent years, people's way of receiving information from television, radio and so on gradually changed to a social media-oriented multi-to-many interactive information dissemination. In recent years, social media users have shown a booming trend, according to Mintel (2016) report pointed out that Facebook's daily active users increased from 327 million in 2010 to more than 1 billion in 2015. According to statistics of Sina’s Weibo (hereinafter referred to as Weibo) earnings, the number of active users (MAU) in December 2016 increased 33% from a year earlier to 331 million, of which 90% were mobile users. The number of daily active users (DAU) in December 2016 increased 30% from a year earlier to $ 139 million (Finance Sina, 2017). Social media is an efficient marketing tool, the cost of advertising is much lower than the traditional media, and spread a wider range. Mzinga and Babson (2009) have pointed out that 86% of companies use social media for commercial purposes, with 57% of social media as a marketing tool. Based on the huge user base, the commercial value of social media is getting higher and higher, and social media can gain insight into the market and find out the competitor and user's evaluation of the product (Kim, 2016).This study is based on the Chinese social media Weibo, as the smart phone industry to the research object, explore the relationship