Online Buzz and Searches as Telecoms Brand Performance Indicators

Abstract

The Web has become a major laboratory of what consumers search, comment upon, and purchase in the real economy. This paper leverages a mash-up of online Google search and of social media (Twitter, Facebook, and others) to “nowcast” the relative product sales performance of telecoms companies in Belgium in the last 12 months. Three findings stand out: first, both online buzz and searches exhibit significant correlation with telecom product sales; second, while Google search explains a larger part than social media of the variance of brand telecoms sales, elasticity to sales is larger for social buzz than for search, except for fixed telephony product; third, in all cases, both data add useful information to nowcast telecoms brand performance.

Keywords: Google trends, social media, nowcasting

JEL Classification: C3, C8, M2, M3, L8