Social media marketing of IT service companies: Analysis using a concept-linking mining approach

The IT service industry values the experience of social familiarity, which is based on routine interactions with suppliers and customers and is at the frontier of social media marketing. To further understand how IT service companies use social media to engage their customers or potential leads, the objectives of this research are to delineate the differences between IT service companies’ use of social media and users’ expectations based on knowledge extracted from user-generated content on Twitter. We applied a text mining approach called two-tier concept-linking analysis to extract patterns in Twitter posts from top IT service companies as well as the related tweets from the Twitter users. We further compare the yearly similarities and differences of the key concepts from the company's official account and from the users. Besides, the key concepts between users’ expectations and IT service companies’ social media use were compared on the basis of first-tier concepts and further elaborated by their corresponding second-tier concepts. Our approach contributes to further understand the socio-cognitive insights underlying the dynamic social media data, from which organizations and individuals in charge can note the objectives they wish to maintain and the marketing gaps they wish to improve on.