What is social media sentiment analysis?

Social media sentiment analysis applies natural language processing (NLP) to analyse online mentions and determine the feelings behind the post. Social sentiment analysis will tell you whether the post was positive, negative, or neutral.

Why is social media analysis so important? Because it can improve your business bottom line!

Analytics provide you with essential knowledge about your social media performance. Think about metrics such as:

• engagement rate;
• social media reach;
• number and type of interactions;
• social media shares.

All of these numbers give you insights into how your audience is responding to your marketing tactics.

But behind those numbers are emotions. And emotions are the driving force behind everything a user does on social media. To fully understand how your brand is perceived online, you need to track social media sentiment.

Why do you need to analyse your brand sentiment?

Sentiment analysis is the cherry on the top of your social media analysis. The analysis adds valuable data to your marketing strategy and helps you target your audience better.

A high sentiment score.

Social media sentiment analysis is essential to examine the results of a social media campaign, build brand awareness, or protect your brand reputation.

Today, we will discuss how to use sentiment to your benefit!

• What is social media sentiment analysis?
• What is the fundamental purpose of sentiment analysis on social media?
• How to conduct a social media sentiment analysis?
• How to measure social sentiment?
• Sentiment analysis tools
• How to report social sentiment?
• How to improve social media sentiment?

What is social media sentiment analysis?

Social media sentiment analysis (also called opinion mining) determines whether a user is talking about your product, service, or brand in a positive, negative, or neutral way. The process measures the general opinion expressed by your audience.

To do that, the algorithms apply natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to social mentions from various social media sources.

Social media sentiment helps you measure the feelings around your social media posts. You can take a look at the brand sentiment, customer sentiment, or measure the sentiment score generated by specific social media campaigns, products, or services. 

That’s an example of a mention with positive sentiment:

This is an example of a mention containing negative words:

A neutral mentions looks like this:

Which sources does social listening tool cover?

The answer depends on the social listening tool of your choice.

Brand24 collects publicly available data from major social networks, including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch. The tool does it in real-time.

There are social listening tools that focus on one social media platform or offer a very robust (and pricy) analytics sections.

Moreover, the media monitoring tool will collect publicly available mentions from other sources as well. Think about newspaper articles, blog posts, basically everything that is written about your brand online.

What is the fundamental purpose of sentiment analysis on social media?

The fundamental purpose of sentiment analysis on social media is to get valuable business insights that will help you improve your overall business performance.

You can apply the insights from sentiment analysis to many different areas of your business. Tracking positive and negative sentiment will help you:

• improve your customer experience
• better understand your audience
• spot social media crises in the making
• measure performance of your PR campaign
• track your competitor’s progress
• protect brand’s reputation

Tracking your audience sentiment can have many benefits to your business. Here are just a few!

1. Improved customer satisfaction

You should use sentiment analysis to improve the overall customer service. Thanks to analysing positive, negative, or neutral social mentions, you can identify the strong and weak points of your offering.

Social listening will help you spot your customers pain points and solve their problems almost in real-time. Reaching out to people who may have a negative experience with your brand can help you show how much you care about them. Turning an unhappy customer into satisfied one will help your business thrive.

2. Understand your audience

A listening tool will help you spot positive and negative social mentions. A thorough social media monitoring tool will help you better understand your audience. You can use social channels to analyse the feelings of your followers towards your brand, product, or service.

Ongoing sentiment analysis will make sure that your messaging is always in line with your followers needs. Analysing the sentiment during product launch will quickly tell you whether the launch was a success or not.

3. Prevent social media crisis

Do you know the saying “bad news travel fast”? Well, bad news online travel even faster! 

One negative mention can start an avalanche of complaints. In the era of Internet trolls, some users might be complaining even if they never had a chance to use your product.

But if you catch the original complaint early on and solve the problem, you might avert a social media crisis. Addressing complaints at the early stage will prevent the crisis from escalating and will protect your brand reputation.

4. Measure the results of a PR campaign

Social media analytics is the most important part of every social media campaign. And social media sentiment analysis might be just the addition you need to improve your social media marketing efforts. 

Sentiment analysis will tell you what your target audience think about your campaign. Generating buzz and counting impressions is not the most crucial part of any campaign. Reaching the right audience with a positive message is.

Your campaign might generate so much negative buzz it won’t serve its purpose. With sentiment analysis in place, you can spot the negative remarks right away and tweak the campaign, so it serves your needs. 

5. Monitor your competitors

To stay ahead of your competitors you have to know what they are doing exactly. 

Inside Brand24’s dashboard, you can easily set up a separate project with keywords related to your competitors’ businesses. First of all, the tool will give you a sneak peek of their campaigns’ results, and secondly, this type of competitive intelligence is completely legal and ethical. That’s the power of social listening!

Once you understand the sentiment around your competitors, you can use the knowledge to adjust your product or highlight its advantages. 

Moreover, you can spot negative mentions before your competitors and propose your solution. 

Brand24 gives you an opportunity to compare your results with your competitors. 

From the left side menu choose Comparison and you’ll be able to compare:

• positive and negative sentiment
• most active social media channels
• the number of social media results for each project. 

6. Improve your product according to your customers needs

Thanks to sentiment analysis, you’ll be able to spot the problem right at the source. You can eradicate it before it escalates and you’ll be able to solve precisely the issues your customers want you to address.

Secondly, negative sentiment can give you valuable insights into your product features. Take a more in-depth look into all the negative mentions and find out what your customers are complaining about the most. Negative mentions will indicate the most important feature you need to improve. 

Maybe your product is excellent, but you could improve packaging? Or the delivery company you cooperate with is not reliable? These are factors you could quickly improve to make your customer experience so much better.

How to conduct a social media sentiment analysis?

Social media sentiment analysis uses deep learning algorithms to perform text analysis.

What’s so revolutionary about this approach to the process? 

Texts that have similar meaning for humans will also have similar meaning to the sentiment analysis algorithm. That way, the algorithm can detect synonyms and attach the correctly identify the feelings behind the message.

To make sure you won’t miss any critical mentions, you should take a look at social listening tools.  

A tool will collect all publicly available mentions and automatically assign sentiment. Thanks to social media monitoring you can easily track and analyse positive or negative posts.

Brand24 can now analyse over 100 languages and provide impeccable social media sentiment analysis. 

How to measure social sentiment?

Measuring social sentiment is one of the most important aspects of your brand health and marketing reporting.

But, how can you measure emotions?

With the help of sentiment analysis tool, of course! Implementing the tool will help you easily spot positive or negative mentions, and will save you a lot of time.

I highly recommend Brand24, not only because I work here, but also because it’s one of the most affordable and best sentiment analysis tools (according to Buffer).

In Brand24, it all starts with creating a project.

In the project creation wizard enter the keywords you’d like to monitor. You can use phrases such as:

• the name of your company;
• the name of your product or service;
• your branded hashtag;
• your campaign-specific hashtag. 

You can set up a second project for your competitors to monitor their online presence and be aware of their social media activities. 

Once you set up a brand monitoring project, the tool will start gathering and analysing all publicly available mentions. What sentiment analysis features does the tool offer?

The volume of mentions

Since we are interested in the impact of negative and positive mentions, we should take a look at two metrics — the sentiment and the volume of mentions.

The graph shows you when the volume of mentions and the sentiment was positive. That way you can easily spot which marketing campaigns resulted in positive chatter around your brand.

If you want to analyse the mentions one by one, you can take a closer look at the Mentions tab. There, you will find all mentions containing your predefined keywords.

On the right side of the screen, in the Filters section, you’ll find a sentiment slider.

You can choose to see only positive mentions, only negative ones or positive, negative and neutral.

You can freely adjust the time range, so you can analyse the social media sentiment from exact period. 

Reach

You might need to perform analysis on more data than just the volume of mentions. A good sentiment analysis tool will let you confront this metric against other, for example, reach. It will also present the change in the social media sentiment.

Compare the social media sentiment analysis over time. 

Brand influencers 

The analysis tab offers more in-depth analytics. If you’re interested in the the estimated social media reach or you’d like to analyse the performance of one social media channel, you can find all the necessary metrics in the Analysis tab. 

Analysis tab hides all the metrics needed to identify the best influencers to work with. The tool will collect and analyse the data. In the Analytics tab, you can find an influencer that will help you raise your brand awareness.

Notifications

All of your hard work when it comes to social media sentiment analysis will be in vain if you miss a negative mention or don’t respond to it in time. 

We know how hectic life can be, that’s why we developed a bulletproof notifications system. 

Brand24 offers different types of notifications:

• in-app notifications (both for Android and iOS)
• email reports (send to your email address regularly and when there is an unexpected rise in the number of mentions)
• Slack integration

You can choose the notification system that suits your needs and always be aware of negative or positive mentions.

Sentiment analysis tools

Of course, Brand24 is not the only tool available on the market. But there are undeniable advantages of Brand24 over other sentiment analysis tools.

Brand24’s social media sentiment analysis is based on a state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm. It means two things.

First, the algorithm is able to correctly analyse sarcastic or ironic remarks. Secondly, since the algorithm is based on machine learning protocol, the analysis will only get better with time.

Secondly, Brand24 is one of the most affordable sentiment analysis tools on the market. If you’re looking for a robust social media analysis software that can monitor sources from various social media platforms.

Moreover, Brand24 covers a lot of online sources, including major social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or Twitch.

How to report social sentiment?

Once you gathered the data, it is time to present the results of your work. You can create a report by yourself, but many sentiment analysis tools have a PDF report feature built-in.

The most important aspect of reporting analysis is the ability to choose the data you want to include in it. You will be able to show exactly the insights you have worked on, show the impact your activities had on the key metrics on every platform your are present.

How to improve social sentiment?

You already know what social media sentiment analysis is and you have to right tools to measure the metric effectively.

Once you are familiar with the current state of sentiment analysis, you can take adequate measures and try to improve the sentiment around you brand.

What can you do to boost social sentiment?

Create content that matters

To succeed in the online space, you need to establish your brand. To do that you need to build brand awareness and become the type of company people go to when they’re looking for answers.

Producing relevant content will help boost social sentiment around your brand. People will trust your company and that will automatically create a positive buzz around your brand.

Moreover, Internet users will share well-written and interesting content. Creating engaging content will help you spread positive news vibes around your company. It will also help you reach brand new audiences.

Target the right audience

Speaking of audience, improving social sentiment starts well before you send off the first message.

If you know your audience well, you will be able to provide the message that resonates with them the most.

Do audience research. Find out what they want to know about your product or service, what their pain points are. Discover what type of content resonates with them best. Should invest your time in a blog? Or establish a YouTube channel?

Before you start posting anything, you need to prepare a buyer persona.

Be social

Social media is all about being social. That’s why if you want to work on boosting your social media sentiment, you need to engage with other users.

You can build engagement in two ways.

First, you can react to other users post. That includes posting comments, reacting to posts, and replying to messages.

You can also be more proactive and create social media buzz with your posts. Ask questions, run polls and try to provide more interactive content.

Work with influencers

Social media sentiment analysis is all about positively impacting your audience. That’s why a great way to improve the how people feel about your company is to work with social media influencers.

An endorsement from a person your audience trusts can do wonders to your brand. People rely on the recommendations of others.

Related read:

• How to measure the share of voice?
• Other social media metrics to track