Have you ever released a new product and it became an instant hit on social media? There were a lot of social media posts about the event, but it’s not clear what they all meant. For many people there are two options to gauge the traffic success:
- This is AWESOME, I am getting people to talk about my product and they love it
- This is BAD, a lot of people did not like my product and they are lighting me up on social media
People’s feelings cannot be simply classified as positive or negative. You need more information to really understand how people feel about your brand or business.
This is where Sentiment Analysis can come in.
Analyzing the sentiment of people’s social media posts about your brand can help you understand how they really feel about it. This article is for those of you who are new to the concept of social media analytics or are looking for ways to explore it further. Let’s take a look at what Sentiment Analysis is and how you can use it to benefit your business.
What is Sentiment Analysis?
Basically, sentiment analysis is a way of determining the attitude or feelings behind a piece of content. This can be done for things like articles, comments, or opinions. Sentiment-analysis tools classify pieces of text as positive, negative or neutral.
Sentiment analysis is the process of identifying feelings and emotions expressed in words, through the use of Artificial Intelligence. Businesses can use sentiment analysis to identify negative or positive feelings about their product or service, and take steps to improve the areas that are not doing well. Businesses can find out what is expected of them by looking at the millions of comments and opinions that are posted in social media chatter, online surveys, reviews, and even videos. They can then act in real time.
Sentiment Analysis algorithms can be used to classify the feelings in the above tweets. These algorithms are more complex to identify, but can be very useful in understanding the sentiment of a particular tweet. Social sentiment is an important part of social media monitoring. By understanding the emotions a person is feeling when they interact with your content, you can adjust your content marketing strategy to better meet their needs.
The emotion behind a post can provide important context for how you proceed and respond. You can apply sentiment analysis to:
- Product reviews and responses
- Individuals
- Issues, topics, events
- Online and social media content
How Does Sentiment Analysis Work?
Since the beginning of time, people have been interested in each other’s opinions. We use those opinions and feelings for our benefit.
As a business or leader, it is important to understand the complexities of your target audience. The data is the most important part of computer-based sentiment analysis. The data can include various content such as social media feeds, music, images, videos, email, microblogging, chat, etc.
The data is typically collected through a few steps, including analysis and reporting of meaningful information. The general steps are as follows:
COLLECT YOUR DATA
In order to conduct a sentimental analysis, you must first collect data from your audience. Most of the time, this content comes from social media networks, blogs, and forums.
The data you collect from online sources is often complex, as people express themselves in different ways using emojis, slang, and different languages. This can make it difficult to sort through and find the relevant information.
DATA ORGANIZATION AND ASSIGNMENT
After you collect data with your application, you need to organize it and assign content data points. Sentiment assignments are made and based on approaches including:
- Machine learning: Predict the polarity of sentiments based on trained and test datasets
- Lexicon learning: Uses predefined lists of words that are already associated with specific sentiments
- Hybrid learning: Uses a combination of both machine learning and lexicon approaches to improve sentiment classification performance
By using any of those learnings, data points are typically organized by “feelings” or by the type of content it is like:
- Product reviews
- Sentences and Comments
- Opinion Discussions
- Etc…
After the information is sorted, organized and analyzed, the data will be displayed visually in a report.
Why Do You Need Sentiment Analysis and How Do I Use It?
Game-changing insights can be gleaned from sentiment analysis. In order to make the most out of digital and social marketing, it is important to be able to analyze social data.
Below are some of the ways you can use Sentiment Analysis for your business:
GET AUDIENCE INSIGHT AND IMPROVE PRODUCTS
If we could read people’s minds, it would be both delightful and terrifying. If you want to know what people are thinking, sentiment analysis is the way to go!
The more data a market has about their audience, the better. It is beneficial to understand how your audience reacts to your posts in order to plan future campaigns and content more effectively.
If you were launching a campaign for a new glitter body scrub, and you noticed that people were angry about how glitter hurts marine life, you would be able to address the problem before launch. This might mean discontinuing the product, adjusting content messaging, making a new product or donating to an environmental organization.
You can improve your marketing by quickly understanding consumer attitudes towards your products and reacting accordingly. This will improve your relationship with your audience. It is important to pay attention to what people are saying about your business so that you can make sure you are not being tone-deaf. If you can use the feedback from the people who pay your bills to improve, that is invaluable! Do not squander it!
RESEARCH YOUR COMPETITION AND IMPROVE YOUR BUSINESS
In addition to monitoring your own business performance online, why not also keep tabs on your competition?
This allows you to not only improve your business, but also see how it compares to others. Additionally, you can learn what others are doing well and apply those strategies to your own business. If you are a bike business that creates customized bikes and you see that your competition’s redesign of a seat has some serious problems that people are addressing online, you can see how your product can fill a void of problems their customers are having.
You can improve your business by identifying what tactics your competition is using that are working, and seeing where you excel and where you can improve.
BUILD GOOD RAPPORT AND GAIN LOYAL CUSTOMERS
Monitoring social sentiment is critical for customer service! Hands down. As a business that is visible to the public and relies on reviews, it is important to pay attention to what people are saying and what they expect from your products and services. Monitoring sentiment provides an opportunity to improve a negative customer experience.
If you are a coffeehouse in San Diego and you receive a negative review from a customer, you have the opportunity to publicly show that you are interested in building a good rapport with those who invest in you. Next time you are in, offer them a coffee and thank them for their time, thoughts, and honest feedback.
By carefully listening to your customers and taking their feelings into consideration, you are creating a strong foundation of trust and understanding. People love brands that seem to understand them and their needs. If a brand doesn’t know how to handle a social media crisis, they will usually end up paying a high price for it. Brands that handle crises well develop new loyal customers.
Why is Sentiment Analysis Important for Businesses?
Sentiment analysis turns unstructured data into meaningful information. This software is powered by machine learning, which is a part of AI that uses algorithms to learn and improve itself automatically. Data that is unorganized and gathered from sources like social media, chatbots, medical transcripts, surveys, etc. can provide a lot of useful information. They can help a brand change its strategy to improve the brand’s overall value proposition, experience, and delivery.
Insights from sentiment analysis can help ensure that a company’s changes are accurate and effective. The areas that generate the most negative sentiment among customers are product features, price, return policies, and customer service. Alternatively, the areas that stakeholders are most positive about are net banking, price match, and such. Overall, these strategic measures help businesses:
- Become more competitive
- Attract new customers
- Retain present customers
- Sell more products and services
- Reduce customer servicing
- Make customers more profitable
- Improve marketing messages and campaigns
What are the Benefits of Sentiment Monitoring?
There are many examples of sentiment analysis in different industries that show how important it is for a modern organization. So to sum up, along with the areas mentioned earlier on, the three broad areas in which sentiment monitoring can bring huge return on investments for businesses are:
1. Product Insights:
A brand needs to know what works and what doesn’t about its product, just like a new entrant in the health food market. It is just as important for a business to know what their customers think and what they want from the brand as it is to maintain a good reputation.
2. Market Trends:
The ability to use high-precision artificial intelligence to predict the future is the next frontier in business. Sentiment analysis can predict a lot of things, like a fall in oil prices due to an impending political instability in a region, or which programmes will be popular in which markets for an over-the-top content platform like Netflix or even the BBC. This is an example of trend analysis using a video content analysis tool in the clothing retail sector.
3. Competitive Analysis:
Being ahead of your competition means having all the information about how they affect you in your inbox at all times. Sentiment analysis is a way for businesses to see how their marketing strategy is working, track their brand reputation, and identify areas where customers have positive or negative sentiment. Companies can improve their marketing and advertising campaigns by engaging their audience, understanding key performance indicators, and tailoring their messaging.
4. Brand Perception:
It is very important to know your customer and understand them so that you can build and maintain a positive brand image. Sentiment Monitoring empowers a company to do this. It helps businesses choose the right channels for their influencer marketing campaigns. One example of how sentiment analysis is used in the real world is the Dove Real Beauty Campaign by Unilever. The campaign was based on the idea that the brand should be seen as positive and inclusive towards all women and children, no matter their color, size, or age. This idea came from surveys of thousands of people. Dove launched a marketing campaign to counter the harsh and unrealistic beauty standards perpetuated by beauty brands and fashion magazines. The campaign focuses on building the self-confidence of everyday people. The campaign was a success in every corner of the world, which led to an increase in public opinion, and strengthened brand loyalty and customer base.
Businesses can only grow when they understand the people using their products or services. Rewriting this would be a massive undertaking as human experience is full of different, often complicated, emotions and interactions. Artificial Intelligence provides us with the ability to not only understand different emotions, but also to set a standard for using emotional intelligence.
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