Social media analysis is essential for understanding how your brand is perceived by the vast audiences that engages online. With 62.3% of the world’s population using social media and an average daily usage of 2 hours and 23 minutes, analyzing sentiment allows businesses to tap into the emotions and opinions expressed in real time. (Source: Datareportal)
By monitoring and interpreting these insights, companies can quickly address customer concerns, enhance their marketing strategies, and foster stronger connections with their audience, ultimately improving customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
If you want to know more, keep reading.
Sentiment Analysis Definition and Why It Matters?
Social sentiment analysis is sometimes referred to as “opinion mining,” a term which defines what the process means. It’s the process of collecting and analyzing information on the emotions behind how people talk about your brand on social media. In other words, it’s a way of analyzing text to determine the emotional tone they carried. Basically, it classifies whether a block of text is positive, negative, or neutral with the help of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning.
Sentiment analysis is important because it helps you understand how people feel about your brand or product at scale. Such a task would be impossible to do manually because vast amounts of data must be analyzed, including customer reviews, social media posts, and employee surveys.
Other benefits of sentiment analysis include:
- It’s trustworthy because it removes human bias through consistent analysis
- It’s more powerful because it processes data at scale
- It saves time because the process is automated
- Using machine learning means you get insights in real-time
How To Run A Social Media Sentiment Analysis
Running a social media sentiment analysis involves tracking and analyzing online conversations to gauge public perception of your brand. By understanding the emotions and opinions expressed, you can refine your digital marketing strategies and better address customer needs.
This approach can be particularly valuable when combined with other digital marketing strategies, such as leveraging the benefits of affiliate marketing to expand your reach and gain additional insights into customer perceptions across different channels.
Here are three steps to follow if you want to conduct a sentiment analysis on social media platforms effectively.
Monitor Mentions
The first step is to find conversations people are having online about your brand. This can be quite challenging, as you might not be tagged in those conversations. To effectively monitor these mentions, you need to go beyond simple brand name searches. Consider using variations of your brand name, relevant keywords related to your products or services, and industry-specific hashtags.
Employing social listening tools can significantly enhance your ability to capture these mentions. These tools use advanced algorithms to track conversations across various platforms, including social media, news sites, blogs, and forums. By leveraging these tools, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of the online conversations surrounding your brand and proactively address any concerns or capitalize on emerging opportunities.
By proactively monitoring brand mentions, you can gain valuable insights into customer sentiment, identify potential crises early on, and build strong relationships with your audience.
Analyze The Sentiment
The next step is to look at the mentions and look for terms that indicate sentiment. In other words, look for positive or negative words people might use when talking about your brand.
Here are a few examples:
- Positive: perfect, great, amazing, love, best
- Negative: terrible, hate, worse, bad, awful
- Neutral: not bad, so-so, alright, okay
Think about other terms that might be more specific to your industry, brand, or product, and make a list of positive and negative words. Scan any mentions for posts that include these words.
Calculate The Social Sentiment Score
You can calculate your social sentiment score in various ways:
- Positive mentions as a percentage of total mentions
- Positive mentions as a percentage of mentions that include sentiment (removing neutral mentions
It doesn't matter which approach you choose. What does matter is being consistent because you’re watching for change.
5 Ways To Improve Your Sentiment Analysis On Social Media
Improving your social media sentiment analysis can lead to more accurate insights and better decision-making. By refining your methods and tools, you can better understand customer emotions and reactions. Here are five effective strategies to enhance the precision and effectiveness of your sentiment analysis efforts on social media platforms.
Understanding Your Audience
Source: Fastercapital
If you want to improve brand sentiment on social media, a good starting point is understanding your audience. Sentiment analysis is a good way to get an overall view of your brand’s perception, but digging deeper and identifying segments within your audience will help you hone your messaging and content, personalizing it so that it resonates better with them.
A good example of how this has worked is the footwear brand Crocs. After tuning into customer sentiment, they discovered that their customers were craving uniqueness and style. This led to them introducing a range of wacky, crazy, and strange Croc offerings that led to a boost in income and a bunch of followers on TikTok.
Understanding your audience is paramount for effective social media sentiment analysis. Accurate sentiment interpretation means you must consider the audience’s unique communication style, including their use of irony and sarcasm, which algorithms can easily misinterpret.
By tailoring analysis to your audience’s specific interests and concerns, you can gain deeper insights, identify influential voices, and effectively monitor for potential crises. This knowledge empowers to to personalize engagement, improve customer experiences, and build stronger brand relationships.
Improve Customer Service
Monitoring sentiment is beneficial for customer service and support in several ways. First, it can highlight any new or emerging issues. Once you’re aware of these, you can prepare your team or create social content that directly addresses the issues.
Secondly, you can proactively contact customers who are experiencing challenges with your brand. Monitoring sentiment allows you to resolve issues before the customer contacts your team.
Take Care Of Negative Sentiment
When your followers post about a negative brand experience on social media, they’re generally hoping for a resolution. If you don’t respond or respond negatively, opinions of your brand will take a hit.
When sentiment analysis flags negative mentions of your brand, take action. By responding to and addressing issues promptly, you can turn a negative situation into a positive one and improve overall sentiment.
“Think of negative feedback as a normal part of doing business. You can use it to make your processes and communication with customers better,” said Adam Zayed, the Founder of Zayed Law Offices. “When customers see that you are listening to them and care about their concerns, you can turn negative feelings into a positive experience.”
Let’s share a possible scenario. A customer complains about a faulty product on Twitter. You can apologize in a timely manner and offer to replace or refund the product. Such action could mean the difference between a lost customer and a loyal one.
Use Influencer Marketing
Influencers have become very powerful in terms of swaying public opinion and impacting brand sentiment. Therefore, when you partner with influencers who match your brand values and have a strong following, you can reach a larger audience and improve brand sentiment.
When working with influencers, always consider authenticity. Choose only genuine supporters of your brand rather than those who would do it just for payment.
There are a variety of influencer marketing campaigns to choose from, including:
- Sponsored content is a type of paid ad campaign in which the brand pays a fee to sponsor the influencer’s content.
- Brand Ambassador Programs: Influencers are recruited as official ambassadors to represent your brand.
- Affiliate Marketing Programs: Influencers are recruited as affiliates to promote your brand’s products and services. For this, they earn a commission for every sale they help generate.
- Event Activations: For this type of campaign, you invite influencers to your events or create events specifically for them.
- Product Reviews: The influencer gives an in-depth review and shares their opinion about your product and their experience.
- Influencer Takeover: An influencer takes over your social media account for a specific time period and creates content on your behalf.
- Influencer Gifting: You send influencers free gifts in exchange for posting about it.
- Giveaways and Contests: A brand puts together a giveaway contest that influencers will help to promote.
- Content Co-Creation: An influencer creates content in collaboration with their chosen partner brand.
- Co-Branding Opportunities: A brand recruits an influencer to assist in putting together ideas for new co-branded products and collections.
Holger Sindbaek, serial entrepreneur and the founder of the brain training platform Online Solitaire, says, “After experimenting with various methods to manage sentiment, we saw the best results when we focused on authentic TikTok influencers. Rather than paying for generic posts, we worked with creators who genuinely connected with our brand. Their personal, relatable content sparked organic conversations, shifting sentiment and giving us valuable insights. TikTok’s real-time engagement gave us a direct pulse on how influencers could truly influence public perception. This approach didn’t just improve sentiment—it transformed how we connected with our community and refined our marketing strategy.”
Use Tools
Source: Predictiveanalyticstoday
With billions of social media users generating content every day, tools can more efficiently identify trends, emotions, and patterns in real time than humans could. Advanced tools use natural language processing (NLP) to detect nuances like sarcasm, slang, and context, which leads to more accurate sentiment readings.
In addition, they can integrate with other analytics platforms, offering comprehensive insights that inform your market strategies and customer engagement. Using tools can help you stay ahead in understanding public perception of your brand and making data-driven decisions.
Wrapping Up
In conclusion, mastering social media sentiment analysis is crucial if you want to understand and improve your brand’s perception. By consistently monitoring and refining your approach - using tools, addressing negative feedback, and leveraging influencer partnerships - you can enhance customer satisfaction and foster stronger connections with your audience.
Implement these strategies to stay informed, responsive, and proactive in shaping positive brand sentiment across social media platforms.
