Social Sentiment Analysis and Why it Matters for Your Business

We have new digital platforms coming up, and customers are adopting different communication methods. As these changes take place, businesses also want to measure the social sentiment on every social media mention of their brand, products or services. This involves interacting with the customers, following what millions of customers and tens of competitors are saying on social media, and analyzing all the data to come up with a logical conclusion. Don’t forget that these customers are using different social media platforms! Therefore, for businesses, staying on top of their social media strategy has become a daunting task. So how can the business owners measure the social sentiment?

First, it is important that we explain what exactly social sentiment entails and why it is an important aspect. Social Sentiment is a way of measuring the emotions behind every social media mention (Lake). For every social media mention, the tone used is important to determine whether this is a happy customer or a complaining customer. Measuring the conversational tone of all the online calls and social media mentions is crucial since it helps in understanding your customer. Actually, this takes out guesswork when analyzing the social media mentions. Businesses that have invested in measuring social sentiment achieve a huge Return on Investment (RoI).

In this respect, businesses can apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) aware sentiment analysis to measure social sentiment for every social media mention. To make work easier, there are social media monitoring tools that make use of these two advanced techniques. In this article, we analyze sentiment analysis and AI and how these can help in social media monitoring.

Artificial Intelligence and Sentiment Analysis

The modern-day economy has benefited a lot from Artificial Intelligence. In fact, this is one of the modern technologies that are shaping our everyday life. There are various aspects of AI that we continue to apply in business. These include Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Linguistic algorithms, as well as sentiment analysis just to mention a few. Social media monitoring is one of the application areas where these technologies have been most fruitful. We have illustrated above, as an example, why you need to monitor mentions of your business and above that, analyze the emotions on all mentions. This is exactly where sentiment analysis comes in!

Sentiment analysis also referred to as emotion AI, involves analyzing views from the written text and recorded voice so as to understand and gauge reactions. Basically, sentiment analysis in social media involves tracking social media mentions and analyzing the text so as to gauge the reaction of your customers. For example, picture a social media monitoring tool that applies sentiment analysis. The tool is, therefore, able to give a report to customers who sound agitated, and the happy customers. With such data, social media marketers can then focus on improving customer satisfaction.

So, have you invested in social sentiment analysis? Through the use of AI and sentiment enabled applications, you can effectively measure social sentiment for every social media mention. Here are some of the top reasons why businesses need social sentiment analysis.

Social Sentiment Analysis Helps to Uncover Unmet Customer Needs

Needless to say, understanding your customer’s needs is crucial for every business. For social media marketers, the social sentiment is a good gauge for identifying unmet customer needs. Unfortunately, without proper information and customer data analytics, it becomes difficult to discover the unmet customer needs.  So, you feel you have not fully met the customer needs, but you lack sufficient information to realize the unmet needs? Why not try Artificial Intelligence and sentiment analysis in particular? Unmet customer needs doubles as a way of improving customer experience, and it is also an opportunity for your business. Through meeting the customer overall needs, there will be a higher UX score. In addition, these unmet needs can also come as additional revenue for the business!

Customers will always go on social media complaining whenever their needs are not met. Businesses need to analyze these mentions and come up with a social sentiment score. The score indicates, on aggregate, how well the UX is so far. A good UX indicates customer needs are met. In most cases, tone variation hinders the potential of realizing complaints on unmet customer needs. This is the reason why sentiment analysis is an important technology in business today.

Social sentiment analysis should, therefore, be part of your social media monitoring strategy. Therefore businesses should focus on using a social media monitoring software that has sentiment analysis as a feature. This makes the work of measuring social sentiment much easier which is a great initiative for uncovering unmet customer needs.

A business like pizzahut.co.uk receives dozens of customer complains through their Twitter page. With sentiment analysis, it is much easier to identify customer complaints and have respective department reply to the particular customer.

Provides a Good Opportunity for Optimizing Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Most businesses if not all, have an active social media presence. Ideally, they use the social media platform to market their goods and services. So, how can these businesses know they are doing the right thing when it comes to social media marketing? Definitely, a good strategy will need a strategic plan. Part of the planning involves analyzing what your customers are saying and learning from the past shortcomings. How will your business learn if you don’t have social sentiment analysis?

Through the use of sentiment analysis and AI, businesses are able to learn the posts that get higher positive engagements. On the other side, sentiment analysis highlights the social media marketing posts that attract negative responses from customers. It is important to note that plain analytical data that doesn’t highlight negativity or positivity is less useful in social media marketing strategy development. Even the posts that work negatively for a business are likely to get a high number of likes. Therefore it is important to dig deeper into the comments, the shared gifs, and emoticons used to identify the exact customer feeling. This kind of information is got through social sentiment analysis.

Therefore, businesses should focus on the use of social sentiment analysis and advanced Artificial Intelligence to study the customer emotion. The customer emotions will, therefore, be used in planning the next marketing strategy. Through this, businesses can get rid of random posting and better their social media marketing strategy. Does your business apply social sentiment analysis when developing a social media marketing strategy? If not, this is the most appropriate time for you to shift attention to sentiment analysis to better your social media marketing strategy.

Use of Social Sentiment Analysis to Improve Customer Service

For modern day businesses, social media acts as a marketing platform, and it is also one of the customer service platforms. Every day, customers engage your business through social media. According to Shep Hyken, it is common for customers to turn to social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others to post their experience.

Some companies are doing a commendable job when it comes to offering customer support through these channels. To effectively do so, businesses need to apply advanced techniques. A good example is the social sentiment analysis through advanced algorithms that help in identifying frustrations from clients.

This is because frustrated clients will express this quickly on these social media platforms. Through helping a frustrated client quickly, a business can be assured there will be another sale to record at the end of the trading day.

What would happen if frustrations expressed through social media aren’t handled immediately? Definitely, the business will lose the revenue that comes from this customer. This can be immediate revenue or recurring revenue when this client comes back in future. Another possibility is that your competitors will snatch the client immediately. Don’t be surprised that your competitors are following tweets to you just to identify a complaining or a frustrated customer. They then immediately follow the customer on social media and target him or her with alternatives.

Therefore, if a business is not able to identify the frustration and address it immediately, they lose immediate revenue, and there is a potential of losing the complaining client to competitors. In this respect, to improve customer service, social sentiment analysis is critical for any business.

Example

Virgin Atlantic is a good example of companies that offer customer support to clients through Twitter. Through sentiment analysis, the company can effectively identify customer complaints and help the customer promptly. Here is a screenshot showing an example of excellent customer care through social media. Social sentiment analysis takes this a notch higher.

Sentiment Analysis as a Lead Generation Tool

Lead generation is one of the most important strategies in any business. Ideally, businesses want to be able to generate new leads through all possible means. With every mention of social media, what comes to mind of marketers is it is a brand building tool. But did you know that social media is actually also a lead generation tool?

According to Jackson, when done correctly, you can use sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram to generate real leads for your business. The good thing about social media as a lead generation tool is that it is actually cost-effective.

Lead generation is all about bringing more people into your sales funnel. Ideally, every social media mention can act as a way of identifying potential clients. As you skim through social media mentions, you are getting to know:

• The interests of people who mention you on social media
• Identifying the products that best your social media connections
• Identifying the pain joints from your competitor mentions

Therefore, once you have gathered this type of information, you are able to know how you can turn these people into paying clients. In the past, we saw brands send survey e-mails as lead generation. However, with many of your potential clients on social media, using sentiment analysis eliminates the need for survey emails.

So, businesses that use social sentiment analysis should also focus on turning it into a lead generation tool for businesses. There are very high chances that the people mentioning your products, services or your brand, in general, are also interested in one of the products.

Sentiment Analysis Serves as Measure of Social Media Performance

With sentiment analysis, a business can tell whether its social media following is growing or not. This can be compared to social media analytics. However, there is a unique advantage if a business is using sentiment analysis. This is because apart from getting numbers, you can identify how well your posts resonate with the expectations of your target clients. For example, whenever there is a positive reaction to a post, this indicates that the post had a positive impact, and so does your brand overall. Businesses using social sentiment analysis can, therefore, identify the best social media posts that get a positive impact and refrain from others with a negative response.

Whereas social media analytics is important, in this day and age, there is a need to enhance it. The best method to use is sentiment analysis which helps businesses to gauge their social media performance. Does your business have a sentiment analysis tool? It’s time you get started with sentiment analysis for enhanced social media performance analytical data.

To Sum Up

Social sentiment analysis is an important strategy in business. Through advanced algorithms, a business can be able to analyze the social media mentions. We have seen that monitoring social media mentions offers various advantages to a business. Some of the advantages include using social sentiment analysis as a lead generator. This is where the mentions are analyzed to identify an opportunity to turn those who mention your brand into paying clients. Secondly, we have sentiment analysis as a measure of social media performance. Another important reason why sentiment analysis is important is that it enables the delivery of customer service and also helps in identifying unmet customer needs. Therefore, businesses should focus on applying social media monitoring tools that have sentiment analysis as an enhancement.