Why Sentiment Analysis is Essential for Understanding Your Social Media Strategy

As social media becomes an ever more important tool for online marketers and digital businesses, we’re seeing an increasing number of new techniques and tools for analyzing and evaluating social media data.

One of these techniques is known as sentiment analysis, which is an advanced form of social media listening. Let’s take a closer look at what sentiment analysis is and why it’s so important for understanding your social media strategy. Read on to find out more.

What is Sentiment Analysis?

Sentiment analysis is the name given to the process of analyzing and evaluating the tone and emotional meaning behind the online text.

It uses highly advanced technological solutions, including artificial intelligence, natural language processing, computational linguistics, data mining, and machine learning algorithms to do so. These systems allow for dynamic and adaptable analysis that can learn as it performs its tasks, making for more accurate and detailed results in the future.

When reviewing online text, sentiment analysis systems can evaluate the speech and language used to assess tone, before confirming whether the message being conveyed is positive, negative, or neutral.

This might not sound very impressive, but when you consider the sheer volume of text that is posted online every day, the potential of the technology becomes far more apparent.

Sentiment Analysis for Social Media

The volume of content posted online every day is innumerable. On Twitter alone, a staggering 500 million Tweets are posted every 24 hours.

For businesses, staying on top of what customers are saying is an impossible task. While big businesses may be able to hire more staff to manage social media, the growth of the business will also bring in more customers, which means even more social media posts.

However, knowing what customers are saying is vital. Social media is the modern-day town square, it’s where the public goes to voice their opinion on everything from politics to products.

With sentiment analysis, the process of evaluating and assessing this content can be fully automated. It means staff won’t have to pour through every individual comment, which can be time-consuming, laborious, and comes with the risk of human error.

In doing so, businesses can build up a picture of the general consensus shared by customers about particular products or services, as well as the effectiveness of their social media strategy. This is invaluable information that can be used to inform business and operative strategies moving forward.

Seek Out Discussion

Many brands will focus purely on comments and engagement on their native content and social media posts. While this data is certainly valuable, discussion between consumers also takes place on third-party websites and platforms, such as forums and message boards.

This has long been an untapped reserve that businesses have failed to identify. By using sentiment analysis tools, businesses can locate these areas of discussion and incorporate the opinions expressed there into their datasets.

This can give companies a much more comprehensive view of how their brand is being perceived by customers and the wider public.

Conclusion

Sentiment analysis is a crucial tool for modern businesses that can allow them to assess the success of social media strategies and evaluate customer opinion.