Sentiment Analysis - Why & How Brands Are Turning Sentiment Online?

Gone are the days when brands were fixated merely on brand awareness, recall, and hard numbers about a campaign. For today’s marketing campaigns which aim at changing consumer behavior, induce action, change buying pattern in the long or short term; it is important to move away from these traditional marketing metrics to the newer ones. And one such emerging metric is Sentiment Analysis.


WHY turning sentimental makes sense?
To be able to influence consumer behavior, it is important to start off by understanding the consumers’ perception about brands in a category and the best way to do so is TO LISTEN. Listen carefully to the feedback about their brands & campaigns.  Listen carefully to the reactions of audiences and their responses to the brand content so as to develop a broader understanding of the “real context” behind these emotions. In comes sentiment analysis to make this task of understanding general public sentiment less of a task and more of a boon for today’s marketers. If a part of your marketing strategy includes social media and content marketing (and it should), it is about time to learn more about sentiment analysis and we are here to get you started!

WHAT does sentiment analysis actually mean?

Sentiment is nothing but the feeling or emotion behind a mention of your brand in the social media universe. It is a way to evaluate consumer engagement with the brand by means of comments and references to gain an understanding of the overarching feeling surrounding your brand. In a nutshell, sentiment analysis involves the analysis of comments posted on social media platforms such as blogs, twitter, facebook, etc. However, instead of analyzing just words, sentiment analysis identifies the person's attitude towards the brand by using variables such as context, tone, emotion, among others. Just because a campaign saw high engagement with 15000 fb mentions, it doesn’t directly translate into good news for the brand unless the true sentiment surrounding the campaign is analyzed. It can wreak havoc for the brand if most users were actually complaining and this online outpour on social media resulted in a negative word of mouth.




HOW do we measure & analyze sentiments?

When paired with more traditional measurement tools such as Google Analytics, sentiment analysis can help create a richer brand portrait and direct your future social media and content strategies. The next logical question then is how to measure sentiments & here are the three main ways to go about it-

  1. On your own – If you have the time and the commitment, you can read, track and score each mention of your brand. Humans are by far the best tool. Why? Because machines will never be quite as good as humans in recognizing the subtleties of language, such as sarcasm, or terms of common usage such as OMG or LOL.
This may be a viable solution for small brands, but as your online footprint grows, it may become an impossible undertaking.

  1. Free tools – There are many free online tools available that track and measure sentiment, such as Social Mention, Twendz, PeopleBrowsr and Sentiment140. Each has its strengths – and weaknesses – so you may end up using different free tools to track different areas of sentiment.

  1. Paid services – Sophisticated services like Attensity360 and Lithium Customer Intelligence Center use algorithms to determine customer sentiment across multiple channels. However, most tools have a hard time registering sarcasm, irony and slang, and they still require a level of human oversight.

P.S.-The intent of this post was to give you a quick idea about the What, Why & How parts of Sentiment Analysis. A more detailed view on the same will be taken up in future posts.
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