Searching for associations between social media trending topics and organizations.

Abstract

Trending topics are the most discussed topics at the moment on social media platforms, particularly on Twitter and Facebook. While the access to trending topics are free and available to everyone, marketing specialists and specific software are more expensive, therefore there are companies that do not have the budget to support those costs. The main goal of this work is to search for associations between trending topics and companies on social media platforms and HotRivers prototype was developed to fill this gap. This approach was applied to Twitter and used text mining techniques to process tweets, train personalized models of companies and deliver a list of the matched trending topics of the target company. So, in this work were tested different pre-processing text techniques and a method to select tweets called Centroid Strategy used on trending topics to avoid unwanted tweets. Also, were tested three models, an embedding vectors approach with Doc2Vec model, a probabilistic model with Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and a classification task approach with a Convolutional Neural Network used on the final architecture. The approach was validated with real cases like Adidas, Nike and Portsmouth Hospitals University. In the results stand out that trending topic Nike has an association with the company Nike and #WorldPatientSafetyDay has an association with Portsmouth Hospitals University. This prototype, HotRivers, can be a new marketing tool that points the direction to the next campaign.