The Power of a Social Media Sentiment Analysis

By Samantha Hager

Take a moment and think of all the people in your life that you’ve met. Can you remember every last one of them? Can you even truly say you remember 50% of the people you’ve met, their names, their faces, and their voices? If you’re not saying “˜no’ right now, congratulations, you’re a literal super genius.  

But, for the rest of us “ordinary” people, the truth is that it usually takes something special to get us to remember someone in the long run. Whether they said something incredibly interesting or incredibly weird, or maybe they just had a unique quality about their appearance, it’s all about the little things that stand out.  

This same logic also applies to marketing. With so many carpet cleaners and restorers in every state, how do you choose to stand out? Well, a social media sentiment analysis may be precisely the strategy you need to be remembered and respected by your target audience guaranteed. To explain, we’ve put together all of the most important points you need to know to not only see the value of this analysis but perform one in the best way possible. With this guide, you’ll be able to perfect your brand image and attract new customers in no time without breaking the bank or exhausting your team whatsoever.  

What is a social media sentiment analysis?

To put it simply, a social media sentiment analysis is the measuring of data associated with how your customers and target audience feels about your business. The average social media sentiment analysis measures your digital brand mentions, reviews, and comments in order to determine what those who engage with your brand on social media think about you.  

Not only can you determine what they think of your content and how they interact with it but you can also discover what your brand image looks like to them and whether or not they think of your company in a positive light.  

As Oktopost puts it, “Analyzing your social media presence is more than just counting likes, mentions, and engagements. It’s a deep delve into the emotions behind all your comments and interactions. This all adds up to a picture of positive, negative, and neutral opinions. Opinions that you can use to create better, more engaging content for your followers.”

Understanding social media sentiment value

While understanding what a social media sentiment analysis helps you to understand a bit about why it might be valuable, there are many other reasons that confirm its value further which carpet cleaning and restoration business owners should know.  

For starters, 26% of US consumers claim poor customer service is one of the main reasons for brand disassociation. However, by learning how to connect with your audience and gain their respect and intrigue, you can improve upon your customer service as a brand and increase customer retention and satisfaction in the process.  

As Warren Buffet once said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” Keeping this in mind, another part of what makes sentiment analysis so valuable is that it can help you to consistently improve upon your reputation and never make the costly blunders that can rapidly break your brand in your local community.  

On top of this, sentiment analysis for social media can also help you to make better business decisions based on data, create more engaging social media content, develop better marketing campaigns, increase your sales and engagement, improve your customer retention and satisfaction rates, and outperform the competition.  

Now, if all of this sounds great to you and your team (as it should unless you’re in the business of losing money), then it’s time you conduct a social media sentiment analysis and see how this simple data review can transform your brand image and customer relations today.  

How to conduct a social media sentiment analysis

There are several steps you must take to conduct a proficient social media sentiment analysis. However, when done correctly, the results can quickly become well worth the few hours it took to acquire and analyze this data. Having said this, follow each step carefully and comprehensively below to revamp your branding in no time.  

1. Find your main audience platforms

Firstly, you will need to determine where your audience is most active and which of your accounts are best for data compilation. For instance, if you only have 100 followers on Instagram but thousands of connections on LinkedIn, it would be much better to analyze the data from LinkedIn for this analysis.  

If you want to increase your traction on the other platforms that have fewer followers or interactions, however, you can always perform a sentiment analysis on your competitors that are successful on those platforms. This can show you what they’ve done right and wrong so you can engage with the same audience and also improve on their blunders.  

2. Engage sentiment analysis tools

With the audience defined, you will now be able to engage your sentiment analysis tools. Since you’re likely new to this form of data analysis, check out this list of the best sentiment analysis tools by HubSpot. With these tools, you can measure customer feedback, perform social listening campaigns, define trends and topics that affect your reputation, and determine ways to increase your social mentions as well.  

3. Develop your categorization specifications

With all of the sentiment data collected, it’s time to start analyzing it. To do this, you must first create a structure with which to analyze the data.  

For this, try separating the data into “˜emotion camps’ defined by words such as love, hate, weird, unsure, sarcastic, and disengaged. All of these “˜camps’ can help you to separate each interaction based on the emotion associated with it to determine what the most common emotions are in relation to your brand.  

4. Analyze the data

While a lot of sentiment analysis tools do the heavy lifting for companies, you can still take the data collected and place it on a scale from 1 to 10 for brand sentiment as a whole. You can also use the emotion categories described above to determine what emotions are most commonly associated with your engagements on social media.  

With this analysis, you can create a baseline to continuously aim to improve upon every quarter. As each quarter closes, perform another sentiment analysis and see how far you’ve come and how much more positive engagement you’ve attracted.  

5. Redefine your brand with the analysis in mind

Lastly, after every social media sentiment analysis is performed, you shouldn’t just keep the data and move on. Instead, work with your team to determine how to improve your sentiment in your community and what ways you can engage your audience on every platform moving forward.  

With each new analysis, take measures to redefine your brand and your social media campaigns in order to constantly grow your audience, engage more positively, and increase your satisfaction, retention, and profits in the long run.  

As you perform each of these steps, one final thing to remember is that impressions really do matter in business. For this reason, don’t be upset or reactionary if your current sentiment online isn’t positive. Instead, take the time to listen, improve, and engage as a true leader to create the sentiment you want from the audience you need.