Predicting Sales with Social Media Data

Abstract

With the development of social media in all over the world, some researchers have tried to predict indexes of economy and society with the social media data. And this method has been proved to be effective in the field of presidential election, stock market and macro economy. But there are no researches about the sales prediction with the data from social media. This paper selects variables from Sina MicroBlog (the biggest social media in China) and builds a predicting model with the sales data of Sony Camera. The model is tested to be significant and effective with an error rate about 13%. These results indicate that the social media data is valuable in sales forecasting.