We now live in a social-first world, where customers interact with brands on the networks they prefer. Consumers expect instant replies, and they know they can voice their opinions publicly or privately. Brands that offer timely responses are valued more than ever, and if you’re looking for a way to keep up with customer needs, introducing sentiment analysis into your business strategy is a must.
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When social media first started, it was mostly used by individuals. As a result, people didn’t think of entrusting business-related matters to this new medium. But as the years passed and social media became more and more popular, businesses began to see its potential as a business tool.
Today, social media is one of the most important tools that businesses use to reach their customers. According to a study by Statista, there are now 2.46 billion social media users worldwide. That’s 32% of the world’s population!
When you’ve got such a huge audience, how do you know what they think about your business? This is where sentiment analysis comes in. It’s an artificial intelligence (AI) system that determines the attitude or emotions behind customer feedback on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. Sentiment analysis can be positive, negative, or neutral.
The Mechanism of Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis, which is also known as opinion mining, is a growing field that seeks to understand how people feel about the subjects, products and ideas they share on social media.
Sentiment analysis helps organizations understand the needs of their customers and therefore improve their services. It allows marketers to discover what consumers like or dislike about their products and brands by examining user opinions posted in blogs, tweets, and other social media content.
Many companies are already using sentiment analysis to monitor consumer perception of their brand. And it only takes a few seconds to find an example of its power.
In 2013, Apple was plagued with a few different controversies. The company released the iPhone 5C, which was criticized for being expensive, and debuted its new Maps app, which was derided as inaccurate and incomplete. As a result, consumers began Tweeting negatively about Apple. If you search Twitter for “Apple sucks” you’ll see hundreds of thousands of results that tell the story:
As you can see, sentiment analysis often uncovers unhappy customers who need attention. But there’s another side of this coin — positive sentiment can identify influencers who will champion your brand and help you connect with others in their social network.
By understanding how people feel about a product or service — or how they reacted to certain events — brands can quickly learn from real-time feedback and make informed decisions.
Ways Sentiment Analysis is Reshaping Social Business
By now, most businesses are familiar with the concept of sentiment analysis. In fact, many businesses are already using it to get a better idea of how their customers feel about their products and services. The ability to analyze the emotions behind social media posts, comments, and tweets can be extremely valuable to any business. The question today is not whether or not you should use sentiment analysis tools, but how you should use them.
Below are some ways that sentiment analysis is reshaping social business:
1. Sentiment Analysis Allows You to Identify Influencers
Social media quantifies and analyzes the general public’s perceptions, feelings and thoughts about a topic, brand or company. Social media monitoring provides real-time insights into how consumers are reacting to your brand and competitors, while sentiment analysis provides deeper insight into what those reactions mean and how they can be used to improve your business.
You should be engaging with people on social media who have large numbers of followers and a history of engaging with their audience. Sentiment analysis can help you identify these influencers by monitoring keywords and hashtags related to your brand and checking whether the person tweeting uses a lot of negative or positive language. This can let you know if the person will be a good ambassador for your brand.
2. Sentiment Analysis Helps You Get Ahead of Negative Feedback
Most often, consumers will use social media to raise concerns and complaints. They want to be heard and they want to be listened to. But it can be difficult for brands to keep tabs on all the mentions they receive across social media. As such, they can miss important feedback from their customers. And if they miss out on negative feedback, this can negatively impact both their brand reputation and customer relationships.
However, sentiment analysis helps you get ahead of negative feedback before it has a chance to damage your brand or relationship with your customers. With sentiment analysis, you can monitor mentions across social media and spot any negative feedback about your brand. Then, you can respond to the comments quickly, apologize for any inconvenience caused and provide them with any necessary support or guidance that may help address the issue at hand.
By getting ahead of negative feedback, sentiment analysis helps you prevent a small issue from turning into a large outrage that could tarnish your brand’s reputation and alienate consumers.
3. Sentiment Analysis Helps You Identify Patterns in Customer Behavior
Social media is turning out to be a great source of customer feedback. By analyzing customer conversations on social media platforms, companies can identify patterns in customer behavior and use the same to predict future trends.
For instance, if a number of customers are expressing anger over an outage on Twitter, you can use sentiment analysis to gauge the severity of their reactions and determine whether it’s a good idea to address the issue or just let it blow over.
Likewise, if you’re looking for ways to improve your brand image online, sentiment analysis can help you understand how customers perceive your offerings. The data can also help you find out how long it takes for most people to switch from negative sentiment to positive sentiment after a bad experience — information that can be used to measure the efficacy of your marketing campaign.
4. Sentiment Analysis Allows You to Create Better Content Strategies
The buzzwords “content marketing” and “social media” always seem to be on the tips of our tongues, but what do they really mean for businesses? If a brand isn’t using social media channels to communicate with customers and prospects, it’s missing out on a huge opportunity to establish thought leadership, promote content, and convert leads.
Sentiment analysis is one tool that can help businesses glean insights from social media campaigns.
5. Sentiment Analysis Allows You to Understand Your Competitors
Social media has become a major source of information for consumers, and not just when they’re looking for recommendations on restaurants or the best way to clean their toilet. They’re turning to social media before they make major purchases, which means that whatever you do with your business needs to be in line with what customers are seeing on Facebook, Twitter and beyond.
In addition to direct feedback from customers, there is another way you can use sentiment analysis to understand your customers: monitoring the sentiment toward your competitors.
If you know what people are saying about your competitors, you can learn a lot about them. You might find out that people like their product better than yours, but think that their customer service is terrible — giving you an opportunity to improve your own customer experience. You might also find out that people tend to prefer a different product altogether, giving you an opportunity to offer something unique.