Skip to main content

We use cookies to improve your experience by anonymously collecting browsing data. We do not collect personal information. Cookies can be disabled in your browser settings. For further details, please check our privacy policy in relation to cookies.

Hitachi

SearchSearch

Select Country/RegionUK

Hitachi Group
Products and Services

Hitachi Group
Corporate Information

Social Innovation Stories | Turning the world’s challenges into opportunities

  • Sitemap
  • Contact Us
  • Products & Services
  • About Us
  • Case Studies
  • News
  • Events
  • UK Directory
  • European Directory
  • Careers

You are here

Home

Filter by

  • Home
  • Communities
  • Energy
  • Health
  • Technology
  • Transport

Title

Beyond 280 characters

What do your tweets say about you? More importantly, how can your business use data from social media? Many are now looking to the platforms for insight into financial predictions, voter sentiment and even crime heat maps.
February 2017
The continued rise of social media has given 280 characters more power and influence than ever before.
By analysing the 500 million tweets sent every day, Twitter can provide huge insight into the opinions and movement of a population.

Financial trading companies are looking to social media to influence their decisions. For example, when predicting how well a new Electronic Arts Star Wars videogame would perform, Irish research firm Eagle Alpha digested comments from gamers on social media. Electronic Arts soon raised its sales forecast, citing “excitement” over the game, while Eagle Alpha made a large amount of money having already seen this trend online. Sometimes even a single tweet can have huge impact. Hillary Clinton caused a drop in biotech stocks with a tweet calling for greater regulation of drug prices, then single-handedly tanked stocks of private-corrections companies when she tweeted about prison reform.

Social media can also be used to help crime and security agencies identify risks. Many people turn to social media to live post about incidents – which means that there is social data on where these incidents have occurred. In order to flip this into a positive, there are now platforms that collect geo-tagged data from social media and feed it into a heat map of crime in an area. Hitachi Visualization Suite does just this and has found that it is one of the best ways to assess the nature of crimes in an area and therefore predict where the next incident is likely to happen.

Twitter has also been proved as an effective tool to track the spread of disease and could therefore help governments plan a response sooner. During the deadly cholera outbreak after the Haiti earthquake in 2010, a study found that online social media and news feeds were faster than, and broadly as accurate as, the official records at detecting the start and early progress of the epidemic.

HealthMap, an automated surveillance platform, meant that informal reports of the disease were available online up to two weeks before official government reports, which had to go through the traditional chain-of-command structure of public health. The authors of the study claim that this could mean we will see quicker, more cost-effective responses in the future, helping populations that otherwise wouldn't have access to traditional healthcare or would not seek it.

BrandsEye, a tool that looks at people's tweets, correctly predicted both the UK’s vote to leave the EU and the Trump victory in the US presidential election. For both votes, Brandseye measured which side had more tweets in its favour on Twitter - predicting that the more popular of the two on the social media platform would win. By comparison, the polls have been shown to not reflect the passionate reactions of many people, perhaps because people are less shy on social media than they are on the phone to pollsters.

Social media has proven to be a force to be taken seriously as the sentiment and news captured by the platform has real-life consequences. There are opportunities for companies to capitalise on this beyond just understanding customers and we’re likely to see more ways that our tweets and posts are used to predict and monitor events.

 

Born in 2017Four future factory facts

Related Stories

First line of defence – fingerprint or fingervein?

It’s time to take data protection back into our own hands, but which part should we use?

Dual-arm robots - taking the future into their own hands

As the old saying goes, many hands make for light work. And to keep up with the ever-increasing...
hub
Find out more >
Case Studies
Find out more >
Whitepapers
Find out more >

© Hitachi, Ltd. 1994, 2018. All rights reserved

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Use
  • Accessibility Policy
  • Modern Slavery Act