Northern Light Launches AI-Based Tool for Twitter Analysis, Research, and Planning

BOSTON, Oct. 24, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Northern Light® (www.northernlight.com) today announced Northern Light Social Analytics™, the first enterprise class, AI-enabled tool that can automatically identify thousands of closely correlated Twitter keywords, hashtags, and authors to guide social media marketing and inform a company's competitive intelligence (CI) and market research efforts.

Northern Light Social Analytics is optimized for strategic planning and business research rather than social media monitoring. Any hashtag can be instantly analyzed to determine its association with keywords, its sentiment, and authors who have used it and their location, either by the number of posts or the number of viewer impressions those posts generated, giving the user valuable insights into social media messaging and targeting.

Hundreds or thousands of terms, both expected and unexpected, appear in social media posts on a given topic. With billions of dollars being spent on social media advertising, the potential for waste is considerable, so an informed, strategic approach to targeting social media messages is imperative. Conducting an extensive keyword and hashtag analysis manually is impractical and expensive, and existing software tools make large-scale analysis prohibitively expensive.

Northern Light Social Analytics employs machine learning to create a ranked list of meaningful keywords and hashtags related to a specified primary term. For example, a pharmaceutical company may seek to promote a drug for cancer treatment. A cursory analysis of #cancer on Twitter, based solely on the frequency of co-occurring hashtags, reveals an array of popular terms that pertain to astrology, such as #scorpio or #pisces – Cancer is a sign of the Zodiac – rather than medicine. Northern Light Social Analytics uses machine learning-based content analysis to bypass the irrelevant, co-occurring astrological terms and highlights terms that are highly relevant to the pharmaceutical marketer's subject matter.

"Northern Light Social Analytics understands the meaning and context of social posts. That's what makes it invaluable for advertising planning and strategy, as well as market research and competitive intelligence," C. David Seuss, Northern Light's CEO, said. "Tools that simply find overlapping hashtags are not useful for planning, because high overlap terms won't broaden market reach on your topic. Our analysis helps guide the content of social posts to maximize their impact and reach. We're concerned not merely with what's 'trending' but with what is meaningful in a longer term business context."

For example, Northern Light Social Analytics can help a social media marketer or researcher determine what hashtag they should use in their social media and marketing outreach; who the influential authors are on their priority topics; and how consumers think about themselves in their market. For CI applications, Northern Light Social Analytics can reveal what a company's competitors are tweeting, what words they are using, and what others are tweeting about the company and its competitors.

"Northern Light provides us with the ability to make better social media marketing decisions than the alternative tools allow," said the director of competitive intelligence at a leading pharmaceutical company. "We have found that the use of machine learning in Northern Light Social Analytics focuses the content analysis on relevant topics in a way that is just not possible otherwise."

Initially, Northern Light Social Analytics is optimized for industries including information technology and telecommunications, life sciences, healthcare, financial services, automotive, heavy equipment, food and beverage, consumer products, and hospitality. It is available immediately from Northern Light as an enterprise solution and as a per-seat monthly subscription.

About Northern Light
Northern Light has been providing knowledge management platforms for competitive intelligence and market research insights to global enterprises since 1996. The company pioneered the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence for the automated analysis and extraction of meaning from large collections of market research and competitive intelligence, and its SinglePoint™ enterprise knowledge management platform was honored as one of KMWorld's Trend-Setting Products of 2019. Northern Light's current clients include seven of Boston Consulting Group's 50 "Most Innovative Companies" of 2018, and Fortune 1000 leaders across multiple industries such as information technology, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and life sciences. Northern Light has over 250,000 users of its strategic research portals.  Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Northern Light has unique content aggregation partnerships with more than 150 of the world's leading syndicated technology and industry research publishers, aggregates business and technology news from over 6,500 news sources, and is a charter member of the Center for Complex Systems and Enterprises at the Stevens Institute of Technology.

Media Contact:
David Domeshek
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508-873-7068

SOURCE Northern Light