The days of solely relying on statistics and quantifiable data are long gone. Now, brands need to identify how customers feel about their products and services through Social Media Listening. It’s easy to overlook their feelings and emotions since they can be challenging to transform into data, but regardless, they are imperative to a brand’s success in this day and age.
Emotions play a significant role in the purchasing decision of consumers. Therefore, it is valuable and often profitable when brands consider their consumers’ emotions. This is where Social Media Sentiment analysis comes into play as it helps you translate consumers’ feelings into actionable business data.
If you are looking to grow your business’ profits and consumer base, keep reading this guide that will highlight the importance of Social Media Sentiment analysis and how you can conduct it.
What is Social Media Sentiment Analysis?
Rather than a simple count of your mentions and comments, a Social Media Sentiment analysis digs deeper and identifies what kind of emotions and opinions your products and brands elicit in your consumers. It does this by collecting information from consumers’ posts about your brand on social media handles.
The analysis puts context into what customers are saying about you and gives you insight into whether your brand, product, or service elicits a positive, negative, or neutral emotion in your consumers.
Why is it Important?
If you are looking to find out precisely what people think about your brand, product, or service, then social media analysis is recommended. This analysis can help you build a better business that resonates and engages with consumers understanding their needs and thoughts.
Social Media Monitoring services or Listening analysis can only tell you how often your brand or product is being mentioned. However, a Social Media Sentiment analysis will give you insight into the nature and content of these mentions.
How to Conduct Social Media Sentiment Analysis
Now that you know about the importance and benefits of this analysis, here are the simple steps to follow:
1. Monitor Your Mentions and Compile the Data
Part of Social Media Listening and audience insight is collecting and monitoring the mentions of your brand, product, and service. This is essential for Social Media Sentiment analysis as well. Most of the time, consumers don’t tag you in conversations about your brand, which is why keyword research or specific tools are helpful.
Social Media analysis tools can help sift through Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to find mentions for you.
2. Classify Your Mentions according to Sentiment
Next, you have to identify the sentiment of what people have said about your brand. Look for positive or negative words, such as love, amazing, awesome, best, perfect, bad, terrible, worst, horrible, and more. You can use specific tools that can scan social media handles and look for these words. However, you should also take into consideration the tone and context of these mentions to make sure that the consumers are not being sarcastic.
3. Analyze the Data
In this stage, you determine how many positive or negative mentions you are getting, how representative they are of overall conversations about your brand, and what drives the positive or negative mentions.
4. Reflect on Results and Strategise a Response
Once you have gathered and analyzed all of this data, it’s time to present and process it. Reflect and strategize with your team about how to respond to or mitigate negative commentary. This will ultimately help you to devise a stronger and more successful social media strategy. There are many tools that can help you analyze all of the Social Media Sentiment report data. Alternatively, you can also seek help from business intelligence firms.
Final Words
Basic social listening provides limited value when not accompanied by sentiment analysis which provides insight on how users view your product or brand, which can help you make valuable business decisions.
If you need help with conducting Social Media Sentiment analysis, reach out to an online market research agency, like Maven Road, to do the research for you and compile a helpful report to enhance your social media strategy and reach.