Feelings go beyond the tangible statistics you can access. As a brand, you’ve got metrics and stats to measure how you’re performing online. But how do audiences feel about your brand? These sentiments towards your brand help craft accurate and actionable insights to work on.
Assessing how positively or negatively you are being viewed online is achievable by tracking online conversations about your brand. This helps you understand how every choice you make for the brand will affect your brand loyalty and conversions.
In this blog, we go deep into sentiment analysis and help you get started with the same for your brand. Read on!
What Is Sentiment Analysis?
As the name suggests, sentiment analysis is a strategy that involves collecting and analyzing data about how the audiences feel about your brands. It goes beyond just mentions and comments and explores opinions and emotions.
It is also called opinion mining, as it digs deeper into words and context surrounding conversations about your brand. It’s part of most brands’ social media monitoring process.
Why Do You Need To Perform Sentiment Analysis?
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To make better business decisions
Once you know the emotions and opinions your target audience feels towards your brand, you can understand what they’re looking for. Their concerns, desires, and expectations become a lot easier to gauge. It can enable you to tailor your offerings to their demands. It can also be a minor feature that ends up being the differentiator between a preferred competitor and your brand. Some video chat platforms, for example, do not provide an HD video option. This makes it a less desirable choice, which disappoints audiences.
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To deliver more valuable social media content
Social media content is all about driving numbers through reach and engagement. But many interactions about your brand needn’t all be good news. They could be negative or positive. Performing sentiment analysis lets you take a tour into the deepest corners of the audience’s thoughts like a crystal ball. Understanding what they like, what they don’t like, what they want, and what they don’t will give you a clear idea of the content you need to deliver.
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To protect your brand reputation
No one wants to be the one that everyone is bad-mouthing. Your brand’s reputation is important when you create social media content. sentiment analysis allows you to maintain quality control online by reviewing the negative emotions around your brand and making the desired corrections. This will enable you to optimize your online presence based on what people say about you.
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To increase conversion rate optimization
Why leave it to chance when you now have an opportunity to align your business interests with the target audiences’? Reviewing the sentiments around your content lets you give them exactly what they want at every stage of the purchase cycle, ultimately resulting in them purchasing what you’re offering. Converting interested audiences into loyal customers requires that extra layer of accuracy in your marketing efforts, and with sentiment analysis, you can!
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To scope out the competition
Analyzing the sentiments surrounding your brand presence isn’t restricted to just your brand. You are, by default, also investigating your competition. This gives you a unique perspective of how the audience views different brands with similar offerings. It also allows you to go above and beyond the audiences’ demands by outperforming your competitors through tailored social media campaigns.
Steps Involved In Sentiment Analysis
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Monitor mentions
To understand what type of conversations audiences are having regarding your brand, it is important first to find them. These are easy to track if they have tagged you in the mention or comment. The challenge, though, arises when they haven’t tagged your handle. While manually looking for these mentions could be time-consuming, we recommend you use a platform or software that can do it for you. These social listening tools optimize the entire process. On Instagram and Twitter, make sure also to track mentions of your hashtags.
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Analyze the sentiment in your mentions
Once you’ve accumulated your mentions, look for the sentimental words or adjectives in them. These can be categorized into either positive or negative sentiments. Commonly found positive sentiments include great, best, and perfect, while often-mentioned negative sentiments include awful, worst, terrible, and bad. These terms will be specific to your brand or product. Users are often sarcastic to try and get a laugh from their own comments/posts.
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Calculate your social sentiment score
You have all your mentions now. You have also divided them into positive and negative sentiment mentions. You need to assign your brand a social sentiment score to give this a metric value. There are two formulae to calculate an SSS:
% of positive mentions
Formula: (Positive mentions/Total mentions) x 100
% of positive mentions for mentions with sentiment
Formula: (Positive mentions/[Positive mentions + Negative mentions]) x 100
Note: Same formula as above without including neutral mentions
The method you choose doesn’t matter as long as you’re consistent. That way, you can observe changes in the metric. The second method score will always be higher than the first.
How To Use Sentiment Analysis Effectively
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Upgrade your customer service
As we’ve addressed, paying close attention to your mentions is a great way to know what the audience finds lacking in your product or service. Concurrently, the positive comments also give you direction concerning what you’re doing right. Addressing the sentiment shown towards your brand and responding to customer grievances shows that you care and are willing to make your customers the priority.
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Spot opportunities to improve
Any successful brand manager knows not to underestimate the audience. While the people working on your marketing and social media campaigns are highly qualified, the audience can provide an insight that everyone might have glossed over. Use your customers for ideas and insights that improve your offering. This is where sentiment analysis plays a key role.
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Analyze your competition
Once you know what the audience feels about your brand, you can look into how much love (or hate) your audience gets from them. As mentioned above, all the insights you get from the audience through sentiment analysis of your brand can be exponentially improved by doing the same analysis for your competitors, thereby giving you a clear roadmap.
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Get your messaging spot-on
While you might have arrived at the perfect messaging for a campaign, getting the tone and nuances spot-on can be challenging. A slight tonal mismatch can completely alter customer perception. Use the insights to tweak how you communicate with customers online.
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Assess long-term brand health
Like human relationships, monitoring and working on your relationship with users will stand you in good stead in the long run. Not only does it let you rectify your mistakes based on insights, but it also allows you to spot potential pitfalls well in advance. This is crucial, especially when the brand is making a significant change – a product launch, pricing change, social media diversification, or rebranding.
Bonus: Sentiment Analysis Tools To Help Your Brand
Key USPs:
- Use detailed boolean mention strings to search
- Word clouds and charts
- Ability to track specific emotions
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Mentionlytics
Key USPs:
- Broad-scoped sentiment searches
- In-built feature with multiple languages
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Digimind
Key USPs:
- Analyzes all relevant conversations
- Over 850 million web sources
- Filters to customize mentions
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Crowd Analyzer
Key USPs:
- Best for Arabic brands
- Social sentiments in Arabic – do not exist for most other tools
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TalkWalker
Key USPs:
- Over 150 million web sources
- Analyzes sentiment, tone, emotion, and much more
Analyzing the sentiments associated with your brand is a must!
Sentiment analysis breaks down brand performance in terms of audience perception. It also provides a way for brands to course-correct their marketing strategies to satisfy customers and accurately improve brand perception.
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