What is Social Media Sentiment Analysis and How to Do it?

8 min readFeb 15, 2023

Let’s talk about social media sentiment analysis.

Obviously, most social media managers and people working in marketing agencies are already familiar with the term. But are you sure you know everything that’s related to social sentiment analytics?

For example, which social media platform is best for sentiment analysis? Or –better yet– how is social sentiment calculated?

Whether you already know what the term means or not, this article’s going to cover important topics, as mentioned above.

So are you ready to learn more? Let’s start!

What is Social Media Sentiment Analysis?

Social media sentiment analysis is a process of interpreting a customer’s perception of a brand, product, or service.

What do people really feel about your company?

Basically, sentiment analysis on social media involves tracking brand mentions and analyzing the collected text data. This offers businesses valuable insights into their audience’s opinions, behaviors, and feelings. What do your mentioners think about when typing a tweet mentioning your brand –and why?

Once you understand the way your target audience interacts with specific types of generated content, you’ll craft better customer experiences.

While social mention sentiment analysis measures your mentions, likes, comments, shares, and hashtags, it’s not everything about the numbers. In fact, as a fragment of social listening, it adds layers of emotions to your social mentions –taking brand monitoring to the next level. But what types of emotions?

In general, AI-powered analytics haven’t been able to identify complex individual emotions, such as fear or enthusiasm. So far, brand mentions fall under three categories based on their overall sentiment:

Positive
Negative
Neutral

So why is social sentiment analysis so important?

How is Social Media Sentiment Analysis Useful?

Here are 7 of the most important cases for using sentiment analysis for building brands.

Better Relationship with your Audience

So, starting with a simple and understandable thought. Measuring the overall sentiment of your audience helps brands produce content that is favorable to the audience.

In fact, social media managers can analyze the emotions –as well as the engagement– that specific types of content generate. Hence, they can understand what their audience really wants to interact with.

This is important –especially when we’re talking about negative sentiment. In brief, when brands detect an augmentation of negative mentions, it’s better to answer them accordingly. Besides, that might boost their engagement rate. Additionally, a polite and caring response could result in a better customer experience as well.

Find Potential Influencers

Without a doubt, influencers are a huge part of today’s marketing strategies. In fact, statistics show that the influencer marketing industry is estimated to reach $16.4B in 2022. So, how can social media sentiment analysis help brands find the right influencers?

As a matter of fact, many micro-influencers review products on their own in the hope of being discovered by big brands.

By monitoring sentiments, brands might find out about these opportunities and further collaboration. For example, Coca-Cola –and numerous beauty brands as well– are excelling at this process lately.

Source: fissyshotit

Control Your Online Reputation

At the present time, controlling a brand’s online reputation is a tough job. It requires constant mention tracking and review management. However, intelligent reputation management tools use sentiment analysis to immediately identify negative mentions.

By separating positive and neutral reviews from negative ones, social media managers can immediately start handling harmful mentions firstly. It’s no surprise that negative word-of-mouth (WoM) comments have a much stronger impact and spread faster than positive feedback. Surprisingly, statistics argue that it takes about 40 positive customer experiences to fix the damage caused by one negative mention.

Improve Products or Services

The first thing to remember about brand improvement is that it’s important to listen to customer feedback. Besides, brands need to satisfy consumers in order to remain successful or even go bigger.

So how can social listening sentiment analysis help you improve your products and/or services?

Not only do you need to determine the overall sentiment of your audience, but you also need to look at individual cases. Use a sentiment analysis tool to separate good from bad reviews. Then, focus on the negative ones and understand what future buyers want to see from you.

Helps with Brand Audit Process

Are you familiar with the concept of a brand audit? It’s a detailed process of assessing your brand’s position in the marketplace at the time. Conducting a brand audit is like a regular health check for businesses. In reality, businesses review their data, discover strengths and weaknesses, identify target markets and increase customer loyalty and ROI.

When customizing your social media report, focus on the sentiment of your brand mentions. By doing that, you can easily determine which practices impressed your audience and which didn’t. Tracking negative mentions will help you identify weaknesses as well as possible risks.

Crisis Management

Here’s another important use case for performing text analysis based on social sentiments.

If your social accounts are blowing up with mentions, tags, and messages, this is good for your engagement rate. While this may be true, it doesn’t mean it’s always a positive thing for your reputation. Getting your brand in the middle of a cancel culture situation is certainly a possible outcome today.

So what do you do? Use a sentiment analysis tool to constantly investigate what people are feeling when they’re typing your brand name. Social media monitoring sentiment analysis tools provide users with real-time alerts that notify them when something like that happens. Then, you can worry about how you’re going to be handling those negative reviews.

Keep up with the Competition

There’s so much going about everywhere today. Online discussions are blowing up in blogs, forums, comment sections, social media platforms, etc. On the one hand, you should really listen to what everyone has to say about your brand, your competitors, and your industry. On the other hand, however, it’s hard keeping up.

Hence, social sentiment analytics is here to save the day once again. The best competitor analysis tools offer clients the chance to analyze emotions behind social media campaign receptions by the audience. Consequently, you’ll be able to look at whatever emotion you need to know at the moment. For example, search for positive mentions of your competitors to see if you can learn something new.

How to Measure Sentiment on Social Media

If you want to get into details, social sentiment is measured by analyzing online discussions with natural language processing (NLP). But you don’t need to know about this.

Intelligent social media sentiment analysis tools, like Mentionlytics, perform AI sentiment analysis on social media for you. So how do these social listening tools perform social media sentiment analysis using machine learning in 3 steps?

Firstly, they monitor all your mentions –including hashtags, brand names, keywords, comments, etc.
Secondly, they analyze your mentions and correctly identify and categorize each sentiment.
Thirdly, they calculate your overall social sentiment score –for example, the percentage of positive mentions inside your total mentions.

Social Media Sentiment Analysis Example

So how does sentiment analysis actually work?

Once you’ve chosen the right tool, everything is quite simple, actually. For example, Ryanair uses Mentionlytics to measure the overall feeling of their audiences.

Firstly, the tool’s mention tracker starts by monitoring all of Ryanair’s social mentions –as well as their competitors. Then, it analyzes each mention and identifies the sentiment behind it, categorizing it as positive, negative, or neutral.

Hovering over the sentiment analysis tab on the top right corner of the overview board will show you cool percentages. Based on the total number of Ryanair’s mentions for the selected timeframe, how much space do the negative ones take?

Tips for Sentiment Analysis on Social Media

Here are the three most important tips for successful sentiment analysis on social media:

1. Answer Fast

As research shows, 39% of social media users anticipate brands to respond to their mentions, questions, and messages within 60 minutes. However, the average response time for businesses is surprisingly 5 hours –more or less.

In any case, you should be answering every mention, whether they talk about your brand positively or negatively. This will help you boost your engagement rate and credibility score, all while catching risky mentions before they go viral.

2. Use it as a Social Media KPI

In general, all your content strategies and marketing plans should revolve around numerical data, also known as KPIs. They show you if your social media managers and marketing employees are doing their job efficiently.

The social sentiment score is often included in social media sentiment analysis reports to evaluate a brand’s social media performance. However, don’t forget about other –more generic– reports, like the brand audit report and the overall social media report. The inclusion of the sentiment analysis in these will help create well-rounded insights for the business.

3. Look for any Pattern

As mentioned above, brands can use sentiment analysis to understand the levels of popularity that certain products/services hold. According to the overall sentiment, businesses can discover if their audiences follow any patterns in what they tend to enjoy.

Obviously, this works vice versa as well –and it’s probably more important in this scenario. For example, the social media team notices that buyers tend to hate new packages. In fact, audiences talk about how they would rather the company stick to the originals. Then, they can give advice to other departments, like the ones that actually create the products and the packages.

Which Social Media Platform is Best for Sentiment Analysis?

As mentioned above, sentiment analysis focuses on analyzing collected text data. This means that words and keywords come into play more than ever before.

So, while you could perform social sentiment analysis on TikTok, for example, arguably, it wouldn’t be the best choice. We’re basing our choice on the platform’s popularity and definitive use of words. Eventually, the best social media platform for sentiment analysis would probably be Twitter.

Conclusion

So, this is all the information you need about social media sentiment analysis. From the term’s definition to use cases, examples, and tips, we hope that we have you a good head start.

It’s a very important and complex process that helps brands improve their strategies, mitigate risks, and tighten their customer relationships. Thankfully, there are many social sentiment analysis tools, like Mentionlytics, that are capable of successfully handling all these tasks.

Have more questions? Book a live demo with Mentionlytics and let our experts explain how our social media sentiment analysis software can help you.

Originally posted on Mentionlytics: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/social-media-sentiment-analysis