Sales prediction with social media analysis

Social media has been valuable sources to predict the future outcomes of some events such as box-office movie revenues or political elections. This paper focuses on periodic forecasting problems of product sales based on social media analysis and time-series analysis. In particular, we present a predictive model of monthly automobile sales using sentiment and topical keyword frequencies related to the target brand over time on social media. Our predictive model illustrates how different time scale-based predictors derived from sentiment and topical keyword frequencies can improve the prediction of the future sales. © 2014 IEEE.