The role of social networks in enhancing brand equity: A hybrid approach toward analysing tweets: A hybrid approach toward analysing tweets

Social networking has attracted the attention of many industries as well as researchers. Advances in communication technology from one side and availability and popularity of information technology devices and platforms from the other side have caused the social networking activities to be an inseparable part of brands’ strategies. Analyzing the data extracted from these social interactions can provide valuable information to help managers to decide about future developments and branding actions. This is what makes this subject considerably important during the past decade. Most of the previous researches which studied the role of social network in brand value only focused on the monetary value of the brands. This simply is not a comprehensive approach. While this research has presented a multi-dimensional approach toward brands by using the brand equity and its consisting dimensions instead. Furthermore, many of the researches only confine a case study with related dimensions and a single quantitative or qualitative data analysis method. Maintaining the case study part by collaborating with a case company using Twitter for its social networking activities, this research however, has included a hybrid approach towards social networks interactions data analysis. This re-search summarized the literature of brand equity and social network and developed the proper model of brand equity dimensions. Finally, the relation of brand equity dimensions and social network’s data has been analyzed. The results of this thesis showed that all of the brand equity dimensions mentioned in literature can be driven by the social network’s data analysis. However, in order to ana-lyze the relation among them, neither of quantitative nor qualitative approaches are not individually effective enough. For this purpose, this thesis recommended a hybrid ap-proach not only towards data gathering but also for the analysis. In addition, the compre-hensive process of using social media data analysis to improve the brand equity along with the efficient way of its implementation presented in this thesis