How can businesses best keep track of customer sentiment about their brand, or the latest trends in their industry? How can they quickly gain insights on what customers are saying online about their latest product line? How can they monitor their competition to ensure the next version of their product does a better job of addressing their needs?

Leading global organizations now rely on online discussion forums data feeds to gain these vital and dynamic customer insights.

Webz.io’s online discussions data feeds to give you the ability to gather insights on customer opinion from millions of online discussion forums, message boards, and online review sites. It does this by unifying and aggregating structured data using advanced filtering to slice and dice data according to your needs. It provides comprehensive coverage that can be scaled on-demand to cover the ever-expanding number of online discussions about your product, brand, or industry.

For example, one Webz.io customer, London-based data analysis service GetSentiment, leveraged Webz.io’s data feeds to provide restaurant managers with the ability to understand customer sentiment about a number of parameters, including the ambiance, service, food, price, and location of their restaurant. The ability to gain access to this type of granular data, rather than a quick glance at general customer opinion, enabled restaurant managers to pinpoint areas of improvement for their restaurants.

Some businesses rely on social media monitoring to keep the pulse on their industry or brand. But this type of monitoring has a number of different disadvantages. For one, social media tends to deliver the news in a highly personal, yet filtered and biased medium, with a bubble of people and organizations that follow and read news similar to their own viewpoints. This type of data manipulation is similar to sitting with friends at a party to discuss and hear about other people. You don’t really know what’s true and what isn’t. It’s also simply exhausting.

Rich Site Summary, or RSS monitoring, on the other hand, offers you the opportunity to focus on the real news, without the distraction and noise of your friends. It bypasses the filter bubble and allows you more control of the data you consume. Leading media monitoring organizations around the world use Webz.io’s RSS monitoring solution for data mining and analysis of the world’s online news. Developers, in particular, prefer RSS for content monitoring, curation and aggregation, as they tend to be more cautious about relying on proprietary and frequently changing APIs due to their influence by user behavior.

With Webz.io’s online discussions API, you can filter and consume the data your application needs in multiple formats, including JSON, XML, RSS, and Excel.