Uncovering food experience from social media

Social media is extensively used by consumers to document their experience after consumption of services or products. Singaporeans use different social media platforms such as Instragram, Twitter and Facebook at least 45hrs per week. These social media channels are used widely to share opinions and reviews about products, which activity is known as electronic word-of-mouth (eWoM). This study used social media platforms to look at feedback on 20 eateries in Singapore: 10 cafés and 10 hawker centers. Using the web scraping method, data was retrieved from two social mediums: the Instagram and Twitter accounts of these 20 eateries. Data collected was analyzed using sentiment analysis by pre-processing data and developing a model to classify messages into different sentiments. The results showed differences in reviews between hawker centers and cafés with cafés receiving a slightly higher number of positive reviews.