Impact of Bots and Suspicious Accounts on Online Brand Personality and Brand Sentiment

Social media increased the expressiveness of users and decreased the firms' control over their brand personalities. Brand managers need to process massive amounts of firm-generated and user-generated content to monitor the way a brand is being perceived on the social media networks. This study addresses two important questions: What is the alignment between the communicated and perceived brand personalities of Indian technology brands ? What is the impact of bots and suspicious accounts on the brand personality and brand sentiment ? Around 26,400 tweets of four technology brands in India were analyzed using a state-of-the-art deep learning model. This study provides the first glimpse of the congruence between communicated and perceived brand personalities of these brands. Also, contrary to the conventional thinking, this study established that the brand sentiment category - positive, neutral or negative - is unaffected by bots and suspicious accounts.