Published By TradeSmith Customer Success
Below, you will find LikeFolio’s most common Frequently Asked Questions.
Note: this data is taken from LikeFolio. Any statements below reflect LikeFolio’s analysis and research.
- What do we do?
LikeFolio’s mission is to spot shifts in consumer behavior on Main Street, BEFORE it becomes news on Wall Street. We do this through monitoring consumer posts on social media… essentially turning Twitter into the world’s most powerful consumer survey — in real time!
Those insights are then packaged up and delivered to you as powerful trading signals that alert you to major opportunities in the stock market.
- Where do we get our Data?
LikeFolio is proud to be a preferred partner in the Twitter data ecosystem.
Learn more about why we use Twitter, how we ensure data reliability, and how we protect user privacy.
- How do we capture mentions when companies and products have generic names like “Apple”?
We have a multi-step research process with many stages of testing and human analysis. Here’s a complete breakdown of our discovery process.
- What is a Consumer Purchase Intent Mention?
When someone says something on social media that leads us to conclude they either 1) intend to buy a product/service in the future or 2) recently bought a product/service. We call that a Purchase Intent Mention.
- How do you know the person is purchasing?
We very specifically look mentions of the brand/product with phrases indicating purchase intent… like “just got a”, “getting a new”, “bought”, etc.
LikeFolio also differentiates between product types, so that a purchase intent mention for an iPhone (e.g. “bought a new iphone”) will be different from the purchase intent mention of a restaurant (e.g. “got reservations at Olive Garden”).
- Why is Purchase Intent so important?
We (and third party studies) have confirmed Purchase Intent is predictive of company revenue.
Read Georgetown University’s Study: “This study suggests that there is new information on social media that can be used to predict firm fundamentals. In particular, third-party-generated product information on Twitter, once aggregated at the firm level (by LikeFolio), is predictive of both upcoming sales and the unexpected component of sales growth at the firm level.”
- What does the figure for LikeFolio Purchase Intent in TradeSmith represent?
In the screenshot above, LikeFolio Purchase Intent of 160.04 indicates the 90-day Purchase Intent Moving Average on 2/28/2019 was 160.04.
This number should be used to compare against itself. You can compare to the Purchase Intent level on the same date a quarter ago, or a year ago to determine if more or fewer consumers are purchasing products or services from the ticker in question.
- What are some things LikeFolio CAN’T do?
Provide insights into businesses that aren’t consumer-facing
LikeFolio’s entire business is built around analyzing the voluntarily created content of real consumers. Here’s how it works. We have no insight into Exxon Mobil because its primary customers simply don’t tweet about their experience with the company.
As a general rule, the more consumer-facing the company is, and the fewer brands it has, the more predictive and accurate LikeFolio data is going to be.
Predict small revenue changes
LikeFolio Purchase Intent Data does not have the ability to indicate small movements in company revenue growth/decline. The best use of LikeFolio data is using it to spot outlier shifts and trends in consumer behavior.
Predict company profits (or any company spending)
We have no idea how much the company spent to get its customers. We ONLY have insight into the consumer demand for their products and services. That’s why when Georgetown University studied our data, they found it to be predictive of company revenues.
Eliminate 100% of spam, bots, or sarcasm in the data
We do a REALLY good job of identifying and killing spam and mentions by bots. Really good. But some will always get through. The same goes for sarcasm, which is probably around 3% of the total mentions in our system.
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