ARE SOCIAL MEDIA DATA ADEQUATE TO UNDERSTAND CONSUMERS PERCEPTION? A CASE STUDY WITH EGGS USING TWITTER®

The eggs’ market is being expanded all over the world and the consumers have within their reach a large variety of eggs, although the choice decisions are poorly understood. This study aimed to evaluate the consumer perception of eggs using twitter data as source of information. The keyword "eggs" was searched in 4 different languages (English, French, Spanish and Portuguese) being used the blog and buzz mining aproach and the triangulation technique to perform the content analysis. The data were analysis using Global chi-square test, chi-square test per cell and Correspondence Analysis (CA). 6,000 tweets, which had 2,600 terms referring to the egg as a food are found at the different languages (1,791 in English, 350 in French, 297 in Portuguese and 162 in Spanish language, respectively). Global chi-square (X2 = 617.1, p <0.001) revealed that the perception of eggs was different among the languages when considering the different categories. CA bidimensional map explained about 88% of the data variability, suggesting the Twitters have captured relevant information for the understanding the problematic presented. Differences were observed among consumers with different languages concerning the period of consumption of eggs (breakfast or diversified meals) or the factors important to the products, such as quality (French and Spanish), animal welfare (French), special diets (French and Spanish), and price (Portuguese). However, the consumer perception of eggs was similar, independently of the language. In conclusion, this study demonstrated the potential of Twitter as a source of information about consumer perceptions and can be used to target marketing strategies to increase egg consumption by the producers.