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Are Black Friday Deals Worth It? Mining Twitter Users’ Sentiment and Behavior Response

The Black Friday event has become a global opportunity for marketing and companies’ strategies aimed at increasing sales. The present study aims to understand consumer behavior through the analysis of user-generated content (UGC) on social media with respect to the Black Friday 2018 offers published by the 23 largest technology companies in Spain. To this end, we analyzed Twitter-based UGC about companies’ offers using a three-step data text mining process. First, a Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model (LDA) was used to divide the sample into topics related to Black Friday. In the next step, sentiment analysis (SA) using Python was carried out to determine the feelings towards the identified topics and offers published by the companies on Twitter. Thirdly and finally, a data-text mining process called textual analysis (TA) was performed to identify insights that could help companies to improve their promotion and marketing strategies as well as to better understand the customer behavior on social media. The results show that consumers had positive perceptions of such topics as exclusive promotions (EP) and smartphones (SM); by contrast, topics such as fraud (FA), insults and noise (IN), and customer support (CS) were negatively perceived by customers. Based on these results, we offer guidelines to practitioners to improve their social media communication. Our results also have theoretical implications that can promote further research in this area.