Analysis of tweets from food retailers operating in Spain and the UK: How usergenerated content on Twitter can help agrifood cooperatives build better relationships with their customers

Abstract

Twitter is an outstanding social media platform that food firms are using to share information with consumers. This research aims to determine the behavior of different food retailers in Spain and the UK in relation to Twitter to shed light on their interests and similarities. This study collected and analyzed a total of 54,000 tweets from 17 food retailers from the social media platform Twitter. Analyzing food retailers’ generated content on Twitter by wordcount, content analysis and social network analysis, several characteristics were detected that could be relevant for suppliers of these food retailers. The output reveals differences among food retailers as well as groups with different strategies within each market and confirms the potential of Twitter data as an information source for conducting marketing studies. Similarly, we found that the adoption of Twitter data analytics by marketing managers of agrifood cooperatives could be very useful for advancing customer-centric strategies. Finally, this research presents its limitations and proposes new lines of future work.