Deductions from a Sub-Saharan African bank’s tweets : a sentiment analysis approach

The upsurge in social media websites has in no doubt triggered a huge source of data for mining interesting expressions on a variety of subjects. These expressions on social media websites empower firms and individuals to discover varied interpretations regarding the opinions expressed. In Sub-Saharan Africa, financial institutions are making the needed technological investments required to remain competitive in today’s challenging global business environment. Twitter as one of the digital communication tools has in recent times been integrated into the marketing communication tools of banks to augment the free flow of information. In this light, the purpose of the present study is to perform a sentiment analysis on a large dataset of tweets associated with the Ecobank Group, a prominent pan-African bank in sub-Saharan Africa using four different sentiment lexicons to determine the best lexicon based on its performance. Our results show that Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER) outperforms all the other three lexicons based on accuracy and computational efficiency. Additionally, we generated a word cloud to visually examine the terms in the positive and negative sentiment categories based on VADER. Our approach demonstrates that in today’s world of empowered customers, firms need to focus on customer engagement to enhance customer experience via social media channels (e.g., Twitter) since the meaning of competitive advantage has shifted from purely competing over price and product to building loyalty and trust. In theory, the study contributes to broadening the scope of online banking given the interplay of consumer sentiments via the social media channel. Limitations and future research directions are discussed at the end of the paper.