Emotions play a significant role in the lifespan and longevity of any brand. With an increase in content chaos on social media, it can be quite a challenge to keep consumers interested and satisfied with your company’s online presence.
With that being said, brands have the upper hand in tracking consumer sentiment and funneling the collected information towards building a more effective and meaningful marketing strategy. This often means keeping a close eye on all types of feedback – both good and bad.
Perhaps you want to take your brand to the next level, or you’re having trouble managing your online community. Whatever the case is, relying on sentiment analysis is a surefire way to identify problems and nip them in the bud before they can become destructive.
What is sentiment analysis?
Sentiment analysis is a simple way of identifying the view or opinion that is expressed through written or spoken online communication. Also known as opinion mining or emotion AI, sentiment analysis is often used to differentiate positive, negative, and neutral engagement, which can be quite tricky when dealing with high volumes of data.
There are various ways to explore sentiment analysis, including data mining, which processes the results and extracts public opinions out of the online text. For example, high engagement on most social media platforms is a good thing. Likes and comments can drive a page’s popularity and reach a wider audience. However, if the majority of mentions or comments are negative, that means something entirely different.
Measuring social sentiment is an important part of any social media monitoring plan and can help you gain a better understanding of your audience. Buyer personas are integral to your audience analysis and defining your marketing strategy, but they can be time-consuming to make. That’s why Socialbakers made this free, easy-to-use buyer persona template.
By understanding your audience better, you can offer the right response and solutions to correct misunderstandings, fix problems, solve issues, provide more features, and improve user engagement.
Why is sentiment analysis important?
Still not convinced about the benefits of sentiment analysis?
The benefits of tracking your audience’s sentiment analysis are overwhelming. In fact, many key elements of social media strategy rely on an accurate understanding of sentiment analysis, including social listening, social monitoring, image analytics, social media analytics, and customer experience analytics.
Exploring the opinions and emotions that comprise your brand’s online page is one of the best ways to shed light on customer perception and build a stronger, more effective online strategy.
Insights provide a data-based marketing strategy
As often as we may try, nothing beats a data-based strategy. Sentiment analysis is a unique metric that provides a plethora of factual information, oftentimes revealing the motivations behind customers’ purchasing decisions or the intent behind their searches.
Although sentiment analysis gives us a closer look at past behaviors it can also steer future strategies in the right direction. Perhaps the packaging isn’t up to par or customer service is holding a brand back – both of these situations can be identified and corrected with sentiment analysis.
Moreover, sentiment analysis discloses strategic information about competitor insights, which can be a gamechanger when formulating a plan to distinguish your brand from competitors.
Ultimately, sentiment analysis provides you with data-based insights on which you can use to bring your marketing strategy to the next level.
Understand your audience
It’s nearly impossible to succeed in business without fully understanding who your customers are. Audience perception tells us who we’re speaking to and what kind of content is valuable for their needs.
Luckily, sentiment analysis focuses largely on how to target the right demographics and monitor the overall tone of the conversation. This way, sentiment analysis will help you get the most out of the content you post.
Are you having trouble reaching the right audience? With the help of this piece on everything digital marketers need to know about target audience analysis, you’ll quickly learn who your audience is and who they aren’t, allowing you to make better decisions in the future.
Boost customer service
The first step to crisis management is being able to catch negative comments fast and respond appropriately. It’s not always easy to distinguish when and where a crisis will occur but with the help of sentiment analysis, it’s always being monitored.
Sentiment analysis and internet monitoring play a crucial role in reacting in a timely manner and containing a crisis. The faster your brand responds the better chance you have of resolving the problem.
Monitor industry leaders and influencers
Staying on top of the market by monitoring keywords or phrases is an easy way to boost your business to the next level. Whether it’s tracking trends or running influencer campaigns, it’s always a good idea to keep industry leaders under a watchful eye.
Examining similar content and exploring the number of likes and shares may provide crucial insights into what others in your field are doing wrong and right. Once again, sentiment analysis plays a pivotal role in future marketing success.
Measure your marketing campaign
Just like any other aspect of business, quantitative data is the backbone of any marketing analysis and should always be the foundation for assessing the success of both past and future marketing campaigns.
Measuring the number of likes, shares, comments, or social media reach is undoubtedly useful information. However, by themselves they lack context, which is exactly where sentiment analysis comes into play.
Sentiment analysis tells a story that explains why a piece of content performed a certain way. Perhaps the post lacked value or customers didn’t resonate with its message. Whatever the case, sentiment analysis will indicate how to build a better marketing campaign in the future.
How to use sentiment analysis for brand building
So now you’re ready to enhance your marketing performance in the long-run and level up your brand’s online presence. Follow these steps to make sure you’re putting your sentiment analysis to use:
Monitor social media
Social media is a place where people can openly express their thoughts, opinions, and oftentimes criticism. It’s a smart idea to stay on top of all the social media buzz to understand what users are saying about your brand.
Consumer sentiment on social media is one of the most relevant criteria to measure your online marketing efforts and adds depth to your social media performance monitoring by allowing you to understand not only the content but also the context of what users are saying online.
If you’re looking to quickly implement sentiment analysis systems into your social media monitoring start by:
Analyzing tweets and Facebook posts to evaluate the sentiment analysis in a time frame for a specific audience
Run sentiment analysis on all your mentions and order by importance
Utilize multiple filters to generate insights that can help you gain a better understanding of your audience
Enhance customer care
When people run into problems, they go online to find help and solutions. Therefore, it’s important to position your brand as a helpful resource to win your audience’s loyalty. Using sentiment analysis, your brand will be able to quickly identify those in need and offer them support.
This is not only a great way to boost your brand's credibility, but it’s also a surefire way to become an industry leader and be the first brand to participate in important conversations.
A simple way to understand how your audience feels about your industry, brand, product, or competition starts with a sentiment analysis tool. This Socialbakers AI-powered feature allows you to instantly visualize audience sentiment for any post, campaign, or topic, so you can understand the emotional impact of your marketing content in seconds.
Listen to voice of the customer (VOC)
Listening to the voice of the customers seems like a no brainer, but it’s actually where a lot of companies miss the mark. Focusing on feedback collection, data analysis, and action planning are all important aspects of VOC and should be measured regularly.
Sentiment analysis can help your brand explore how people are talking about your brand and the most powerful way to engage with them.
Leverage social media listening tools to learn what your community is saying about your business with a social media listening tool. This feature promotes a seamless workflow while ensuring that no comment or question goes unanswered.
Learn from product analysis
There’s nothing worse than watching negative reviews flood your feed and ultimately ruin your brand’s reputation. It’s imperative to address negative feedback in a swift manner and ensure that the complaint won’t happen again.
Using sentiment analysis, it’s easy to keep track of mentions for a specific product and respond to negative reviews before they get out of hand. It’s also a clever way to turn negative comments into positive engagement while taking constructive criticism from consumers.
Be competitive
At the end of the day, a strong brand should shape its online presence to add a competitive edge to both its products and reputation. Therefore, monitoring not only consumers’ sentiment but also competitor insights creates a clever algorithm.
Sentiment analysis is a powerful tool for predicting people’s reactions and can be a strong indicator as to which attitude your brand should adopt. Both positive and negative comments tell a story about what people like and dislike about a specific product or brand, so it’s important to tune into the conversation.
The takeaway
Sentiment analysis can differentiate a wide spectrum of emotions and point marketers in the right direction for both creating an online strategy and building a positive brand. Understanding customer reactions and product reviews can provide brands a unique look into how customers already feel about them and what they can do to improve those feelings.
Just as a doctor would take the vitals of a patient, examining your sentiment analysis is the heartbeat of the brand in many ways. In order to sustain a healthy business and happy customers, it starts with monitoring the sentiment that surrounds your brand.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on socialbakers.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
