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As Community Management experts, we understand how crucial it is to respond to the comments and enquiries your brand receives online. However, responding isn’t the only activity you should be focusing on - tracking the sentiment of your social media messages is just as important.
Not only does sentiment analysis reveal how your audience feels about your products, services and content, it also provides you with highly practical data that you can use to inform key business decisions and make effective operational changes. In fact, 71% of social media marketers say they are able to share social insights with other departments. Basing these changes on guesswork instead of real data can lead to wasted time, money and resources for you and your team, so you should always make sure you have an in-depth understanding of what your customers really want and need before going ahead with any major business developments. Today, we’re outlining some more main reasons why you need to start measuring your social media sentiment.
Feedback on Your Products & Services
One of the biggest advantages of sentiment monitoring is that it enables you to get instant feedback about your products and/or services. Is there a trend in negativity surrounding a specific item? Are customers enjoying your latest release? Without a comprehensive sentiment strategy in place, there’s no concrete way for you to know how well your efforts are being received by the public.
If a product is garnering lots of praise and positivity, it’s a clear sign that you’re doing things right and should push it to the forefront of your store or website. On the other hand, if a particular item is the target of many complaints and is evidently making customers unhappy, it might be time for you to retire it from your collection or make some substantial changes to improve its performance.
Top tip
Beware of sarcasm and irony, both of which are commonly used on social media to express dissatisfaction. AI-based sentiment trackers often struggle to interpret sarcastic comments, which can result in positive sentiment being wrongly detected. Learn more about why a human-led approach is much better for your business in our previous blog post.
Competitor Analysis
Sentiment analysis allows you to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing - both good and bad. You can compare and contrast how people talk about your brand with how they talk about others in your industry, and find out if similar brands are offering products, services or experiences that you aren’t. You can also discover how your competitors speak to their own customers: what tone of voice are they using? How are people reacting to those conversations? This analysis can help you identify gaps in the market and opportunities for you to get one step ahead.
Analysing the sentiment of your competitors’ audiences can also act as a safety blanket, shielding your business from future crises and PR disasters. For example, you might be considering a risqué or controversial content campaign for an upcoming product launch - but seeing this go badly for a competitor will warn you to steer clear of making the same mistake.
Enhance Your Customer Service
As well as revealing how people feel about your products, monitoring your sentiment lets you measure the effectiveness of your current customer service strategy. After all, there’s little point in offering an amazing product if you’re treating your customers poorly during the purchasing journey. 88% of consumers actually prefer doing business with a company that offers quality customer service over one that has the latest and most innovative products.
Because of this, it’s vital to keep track of what people are saying about your standard of customer care. Are they frustrated with long wait times, unhelpful responses or impoliteness? Would they rather talk to a real person than a bot? If the majority of your online mentions are about bad service rather than your products, this indicates that you need to upgrade your customer support process. Everyone can think of a brand with notoriously terrible customer service - don’t let it be yours!
See Which Offers Gain Traction
Another benefit of tracking your sentiment is that it enables you to see which of your offers, deals and discounts are gaining the most traction on social media. Ultimately, the aim of sharing special offers with your audience is to surprise and delight them, and incentivise purchases, orders or bookings - so it makes sense to monitor whether they are successfully meeting these goals.
Customers might feel that a particular discount isn’t sufficient, or experience issues when attempting to enter a voucher code on your website. They may believe that a deal should apply to a wider range of products, or that a competitor’s offer provides a better saving than yours. Carrying out sentiment analysis means you can A/B test these offers, pinpoint which ones your customers are happiest with and therefore which ones are giving your business the highest ROI.
Human Insight
Developed in-house by our Business Development Manager, Human Insight is the first ever sentiment analysis service to be run by real people, not bots. Our dedicated team tracks all of our clients’ incoming messages and comments on social media, manually logging their sentiment to outline how their businesses are being talked about online. We assemble accurate reports detailing the truest reflection of businesses across social media, whether that’s through direct mentions, untagged comments, keywords or phrases.
Two of the nation’s biggest brands, Papa Johns Pizza and Kwik Fit, have been able to make both large and small scale business changes based on the data we’ve collected for them through Human Insight. This has boosted the positive sentiment surrounding each of them, and has reduced the level of negativity they experience online. Additionally, with both of these brands having multiple locations across the country, Human Insight has helped them take note of any site-specific concerns and highlight their best and worst performing branches.
Summary
It’s important to remember that sentiment analysis involves more than just sorting comments into positive or negative boxes - it’s all about breaking that information down into useful topics, categories and trends, and building a defined picture of how your brand is perceived by those who matter most.
Customer emotions and reactions are often complicated and vary widely in intensity. That’s why we always encourage businesses to use Human Insight instead of AI-based sentiment tracking systems which can’t reach the same level of depth and understanding as our team. If your current sentiment monitoring process isn’t achieving the results you need to make impactful brand changes, contact us to find out what we can do for you.
