Mining Social Media (Twitter) Data for Corporate Image Analysis: A Case Study in the Indonesian Mining Industry

PT Freeport Indonesia (PTFI) is the largest multinational mining company in Indonesia which frequently becomes trending topics on social media. Since the continuation of the company's business operations depends on many stakeholders including the regulators, it is important for the company to listen to public opinion in order to develop a solid public relation strategy to maintain its corporate reputation. The objective of this study is to gather insights from social media as input towards a data-driven public relations strategy development. As a case study, we analysed Twitter conversations mentioning PTFI between 20 to 30 August 2020 during which there was a strike in the company. We performed text mining techniques using Drone Emprit system specifically sentiment analysis, bot analysis, and descriptive analysis to get quantitative measures of the corporate image on social media. The findings suggest several improvement opportunities of the current social media strategy of the company including the lack of engagement from local communities, the absence of specific strategy to handle negative sentiment, and the lack of awareness of social media topics not reported by mainstream media. As the implication of the findings, we propose several recommendations including nurturing engagement from employees and local communities, addressing the most influential tweets, and choosing better time periods to get more engagement.