A Beginner’s Guide to Social Media Sentiment Analysis

A brand can create numerous content and publish them online and the team will be happy enough if the post gets many shares, likes, or comments. But these numbers, though impressive, are not the sole indicators of a successful post. This is where the social sentiment comes in. It is how brands measure the level of perception that their audience has for their product. Sentiment can either be positive, negative, or neutral, all of which can be efficiently tracked by sentiment analysis tools. To fully maximize sentiment tracking, it is important to understand that social media sentiment analysis is useful for brands to know what kind of content is best received by the public.

Social media sentiment tracking is an insightful act to know the feelings, emotions, and attitudes of people towards a post or a campaign. A thousand shares may not be so valuable if the caption users put when sharing includes their negative review about the post. After all, not all exposure adds to a brand’s positive image. This is where social media sentiment analysis tools come in to play. Where metrics can only quantify, sentiment analysis puts these numbers to context. It is important for brands to listen to these sentiments and guide their next steps with such information.

Put Social Media Sentiment to Good Use

Whether you wish to employ Twitter sentiment analysis or even Facebook sentiment analysis, it is a must to always be informed of what users say in all the platforms where the brand is present.
To fully appreciate why it is worth to keep a close eye on these sentiments here are 5 ways social
media sentiment can be used to leverage a brand:

1. Sentiment Analysis Service Give Insight On Brand Health

It cannot be denied that marketing strategies and tactics can benefit from knowing what makes customers tick or what makes them love certain posts. With a simple survey of sentiments, one can already pinpoint their position on where the brand stands within the minds (or shopping lists) of their target audience. It is also a great way to validate good social media practice and improve posts that got a bad reaction, and ultimately get a pulse of the brand’s online reputation.

2. Influence Brand Messaging and Communication

Sentiment monitoring tools are used to help gather feedback at a faster pace. This way, the next posts and marketing materials can be tailored after what resonated most with the audience. It is also a great way for the brand to be more sensitive about topics or issues that pulls strings within the community. Emotions play a big role when it comes to decision making for buyers, so brands definitely need to step up and create messaging (and products) that make people feel satisfied. Social media sentiment analysis can make it easier for brands to identify how to proceed.

3. Identify high-performing campaigns or products

In some ways, Social media sentiment analysis can be an extension of market research (and has the potential to be a cost and time-efficient alternative, too). Public perception is key to maintaining or improving one’s product line, and social media delivers fast (often raw) reviews from actual people. This level of authenticity has its own clout and can also influence other people to either buy or ditch the product.

4. Be Alert For Any Crisis, Strengthen Customer Service

Social media sentiment analysis can also help identify keywords to let you know specific words or phrases used together with the brand or product. This way, businesses can already fish out impending crisis or negative backlash. Social media sentiment analysis is a great way to build relationships with customers by letting brands known which posts to reply to. Furthermore, knowing such sentiments can aide customer service as well.

5. Check out Competition

Social media sentiment analysis as a marketing tool delivers other value-added results that can impact how brands run their social media persona. At the same time, social media analysis tools can also be utilized to check out competitors and their posts. Identify which campaigns or posts garnered the most likes or comments, and see what the people commended about it. Likewise, if a brand goes under fire, it is also helpful to know what brought about the negative perception and response.

Social Media Sentiment Analysis in Action

To get a thorough understanding of this practice, one can try it out with public posts or even his or her personal account.

First, identify which platform you wish to conduct your research. Whether it is on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Youtube, public sentiment is present and each can be a gold mine of information. For platforms like Facebook which optimized its like button with various levels of satisfaction (like, happy, love, angry, and amazed), it is made easier to see if a post is well received.

Check your mentions in these sites. Next, go through the mentions and see how people talk about the brand. For bigger businesses, going through each mention and comment is daunting and time-consuming, that is why social media analysis tools are often used to aide in this pursuit.

After going through and collecting the mentions and comments, it is time to identify their emotions, perceptions, and feelings about the brand. Separate positive, negative, and neutral comments and group accordingly. This will already provide a rough number that can give an idea if the brand or product is liked or not.

After getting the metrics, dig deeper and find the context that can substantiate why uses liked or disliked the product. Context is king in sentiment analysis and is often the deal-breaker when identifying what when right or wrong with a certain social media post.

Sentiment Analysis Tools

Other social media metrics like follower count, comments, likes, and shares are easily available for anyone, tone and sentiment analysis requires an in-depth dive into context and words which may be time-consuming and overwhelming. To make things more streamlined, brands can turn to sentiment analysis tools.

For example, at Insikt Intelligence, we offer sentiment analysis solutions within the Insikt Spotlight Platform, which has been designed to help law enforcement agencies, as well as users from other industries to monitor and extract data. Insikt Spotlight contains an integrated front end that enables the user to perform both specific and “fuzzy” searches on the database that is created from the analysis of the texts. These include smart search, focused search, network analysis and line and pie/bubble graphs by text parameters – graphs of all parameters of the texts: document categories, sentiment towards entities, ideas etc.,

No matter which sentiment analysis tool you end up using, it is important to learn from the results being delivered. Sentiment analysis is a good way to know your audience more, figure out what they like and know which kinds of posts get them to like, share, or tag a friend. Furthermore, social media sentiment analysis lets brands know how to effectively engage and pique the interest of their target market.

Final Words

Social media sentiment analysis is only one among the other acts that make social media a powerful research and marketing tool. Aside from sentiment analysis, experts and practitioners can also venture to quantify metrics, continuous social media listening, audience or competitive analysis. These all bring unique information and helpful insights to the table, but it is sentiment analysis that could give context to the quantitative data presented by the others.