5 Reasons Why Sentiment Analysis Should Be Part Of Your Social Media Strategy
‘Customer is king’ has never rung more true than current times when the success of a business depends a lot on pleasing the customer.
With the surge in social media strategy, it has become crucial for brands to keep their eyes and ears open and listen carefully to what is being said about their business. And it is even more important to know whether what is being said is positive or negative.
This is where sentiment analysis comes into the picture. You can determine where your social media strategy is headed by analyzing social media sentiment. Tracking sentiment helps you understand what the person behind a social media post is feeling. Knowing the emotion behind a post can provide important context for you to decide how to proceed and respond.
The importance of analyzing social sentiment emerges as shifts in sentiment on social media have been shown to correlate with shifts in the stock market. The applications of sentiment analysis are broad and powerful. The ability to extract insights from social data is being seen as a boon and used extensively by organisations all over the world.
As language evolves, the dictionary that machines use to understand sentiment continues to expand. With the use of social media, language is evolving faster than ever before. Words and character limits, the need to be succinct and other prevailing memes have transformed the ways we talk with each other online. Efficient social listening tools have effectively developed to tackle the challenges these changes bring along.
Let’s see how having sentiment analysis in your social listening tool can push your business further ahead. Needless to say, it goes beyond seeing context in weekly reports.
- Prioritize your social media engagement When you log in to check on social media every day, it is important to deal with the most important mentions first. You need to make sure you respond to any unhappy customers as quickly as possible and placate them before the matter escalates.
In most social listening tools, you can filter your unread or new mentions by sentiment. You will be able to filter out the lower priority items and focus on things that need to be dealt with first. This will help you to be on the lookout for a PR or social media crisis, assist irate followers needing help and respond to negative feedback from third parties.
Sorting by sentiment can also help you drill down to what you’re looking for faster, when you need to find and browse mentions. - Measure your brand’s reputation The data on sentiment trends and patterns on social media will give you a clearer picture of your brand’s reputation. It will help you see how positively or negatively your brand is perceived on social media, based on the tone of mentions.
You can look out for changes in average sentiment to signal shifts in perception; if the general conversation around your brand is changing. Another way to use sentiment reporting is to see the response to certain campaigns, launches, or events. Again you can tie that to the bigger picture to add context to your social media mentions.
For example, you may be able to attribute a jump in negative sentiment to your website going down a few days ago. Or you can check the aggregate data a week after a new product launch to see how the product’s being talked about. - Assist with potential crises You always hope your brand never experiences a social media crisis, but you also always need to be prepared to deal with one anyway. There are lots of ways social listening helps you be on the lookout for a possible crisis. Sentiment analysis is one of them.
Working with whoever handles your company’s PR or corporate communications can make it easy to spot a sticky situation before it turns into a full-blown crisis. However if a crisis does occur, being able to measure and filter things by sentiment makes it easier to manage communications and get things sailing smoothly again. Using social media sentiment analysis during the crisis can help their team monitor how it has impacted their overall brand reputation, who’s talking negatively about the brand, and what they’re saying.
Having all that information would help react quickly and put a longer term plan in place for dealing with the situation. - Perform competitive research Sentiment analysis is also useful for competitive analysis. Creating alerts to monitor your competitors will enable you to measure sentiment for them too just as you do for yourself. You can use sentiment analysis to measure and report on how your competitors are talked about on social media. You can make a note of the positive mentions for inspiration, and the negative mentions for community building or lead generation opportunities.
Just like with your own brand, you can also monitor how certain campaigns, announcements, and events impact their overall reputation. Even if the conversation doesn’t involve you, you can move in at the right time. You can turn a competitor’s detractor into your next customer, by replying to tweets when the opportunity arises without being too pushy. This is a great real-time way to engage with the community in your industry. - Add context to share of voice Share of voice is another great way to benchmark yourself against competitors. However, this is a metrics that doesn’t always give the full picture. For example, you may have the majority share of voice for your industry, but you may find out that most of the conversation is actually negative.
Sentiment analysis will add more context to your share of voice metric and compare and contrast the sentiment of different competitors’ social mentions. You will be able to gauge the market’s reaction to your brand as against your competitors’ brand for different campaigns and events.
Intermind has undertaken challenging social media marketing projects for clients ranging from the Government to startups. We have experience working with the top social listening tools in the market and can help you choose the right software for your social media needs.
