Touching the future through Tablets: Social media buzz analysis of top tablet makers

Tablets are the technology’s industry’s latest gold rush. With Apple selling 15 million iPads in 2010 and selling as many as 45 million in 2011, everyone wants a piece of the public’s sudden infatuation with multi-touch slabs of silicon. From the world’s biggest computer companies to obscure little parts makers, there have been a mind boggling number of companies that released tablets this year.

Whether you are a student, business professional or just love technology, tablets have something for everyone. The best devices offer a responsive touchscreen that quickly obeys your every command. You can take notes, send emails and create documents or slideshows anywhere, anytime. Using the built-in cameras, you can capture images at a moment’s notice or even communicate via video chat with anyone around the world. Tablets are quickly becoming the ultimate computing device. They combine the functionality of a notebook with the convenience of a mobile phone to deliver a robust yet portable device that can be used on the go.

With so many options in hand we as customers find it difficult to choose among the best. At the same time the makers have a tough task in generating the right kind of awareness in such a competitive environment. The only advertising medium that has the potential to reach the most number of people is social media and most of the companies are using this space very wisely to create as much buzz as possible.

This motivated us to track the tablet industry to check out the buzz generated for various tablets now available in the market. Such kind of analysis helps us out in determining a brand’s popularity at the same time understand people’s perception regarding that particular brand.

The tablets considered for this analysis include: Apple’s iPad(all versions), Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Blackberry Playbook, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab(all versions) & others which included Motorola Xoom, Toshiba Thrive, Asus EEE Pad, HTC Flyer etc.

These are some of our findings:

From the graph above we can see that the iPad grabs almost half of the social media share of voice! No wonder Apple’s iPad cements its position at the head of the tablet pack. Considering their relatively newer entries, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Blackberry Playbook captured over 20% each providing competing alternatives and options to iPads to specific user segments. It’s interesting to note that Samsung which has a huge fan following in Asia and Europe is yet to get a foothold in the US markets as can be clearly seen from the low amount of mentions.

No specific winner based on social media sentiment balance

From the sentiment analysis, we can possibly infer people are still awestruck by this wonder instrument called tablet and their expectations are mostly driven by whatever is available in the market. Manufacturers have a huge advantage by coming up with innovative features and sizes targeting specific demographics, resulting in much higher satisfaction from customers once they own any of these devices. The sentiments are mostly positive for all the manufacturers.

Two fascinating points which we came across were:

• The negative sentiments were either due to the user’s inability while handling/understanding the product or the user was busy praising a rival product.
• Samsung had more negative reviews than any other tablet. No particular reason for higher negative sentiment is standing out, other than most of it is driven by comparison with various other alternatives.

Since there was no clear winner in the sentiment battle we pondered over the gigantic success of Apple’s iPad over other tablets. We formed a word cloud for the same and had a rather interesting observation:

The popularity of the iPad is based on totality of the package offered and the goodwill earned in all these years. The sizzling hardware along with beautiful software features has captured people’s imagination and it seems Apple users are not ready to move on to any other product. Apple is repeatedly using this in their favour by coming up with a host of improvements like Siri with every release of its newer version thus retaining the loyal customer base. At the same time Apple has to be cautious as others are catching up and enquiries are being about other OS(Android, Windows) and products as seen from the word cloud.

PS. Tablets in general are facing tough competition from their younger siblings namely the Smartphones!!!

Please watch this space for more interesting blogs on social media analysis in the weeks to come as we continue to monitor social media events as and when they happen. We would love to have your suggestions / feedback on the above article.

If you are interested in social media monitoring tools from VOZIQ to track and monitor online content for your brand, feel free to request a demo or open an account with VOZIQ.