A Quantitative Study of the Impact of Social Media Reviews on Brand Perception

Abstract: This thesis can be categorized under the Influencer Marketing industry with respect to social media initiatives. Influencer marketing is a modern tactic used by brands to enhance their visibility to their target audience by using the services of influential people. The objective of this thesis is to quantify the impact of social media reviews on brand perception. Specifically, this thesis focuses on two diverse media platforms commonly used for sharing opinions about products or services by publishing audio-visual or textual reviews: YouTube and Yelp. First, we quantitatively analyze the impact of YouTube reviews of Smartphones on the audience through their response to these video reviews. Second, using our findings from 942 YouTube Smartphone reviews, we introduce a statistical model to predict audience engagement on a given video. Finally, we apply our method of quantifying the impact of reviews on the content published on Yelp.com in the restaurant industry. The results from this validation show that our method can be generically applied to other social media platforms and consumer-focused industries. Our method can be employed by brand managers to turn social media reviews into real-time feedback mechanism in order to improve brand perception in the minds of their target audience.