by The AgencyWhen you’re building a brand, social media can be an incredibly helpful tool for marketing purposes. However, if you think all you’ll need to do is pay for a few social media ads or share a few posts each day, know that there’s more to the story. You have to get in tune with what your customers and followers want to see. You need to know the overall sentiment as it relates to your brand. This is where a sentiment analysis can be highly useful. Consider the following steps in order to efficiently conduct a sentiment analysis on social media platforms.
Post Engagement
Even though it might seem obvious to check the comment section of your posts on social media platforms, there are plenty of people who don’t check for different reasons. For starters, the internet can be a scary place. There are a lot of mean people out there. As a result, there are business owners who avoid the comment section in order to preserve their mental health.
While this is completely understandable, it can’t be the end of the conversation. If you can’t look at the comments, find someone else who can peruse the comments for you. You’ll want to make sure that your company is providing content that people actually want to engage with. So if you don’t have any comments at all, this is a sign that people aren’t interested or that you need to do a better job of finding your audience on social media. If the comments tend to be surrounding questions people have, these comments can be indicators of future content you need to produce. Use each question that you’re answering in the comment section as another post to further inform your audience and be a useful tool.
Commonly Used Words and Phrases
Use different tools and social media analytics programs in order to comb through the mentions and comments surrounding your brand on social media. You can even sign up for Google Alerts to be notified when a website mentions your company. Notice the words that are commonly used when people are talking about your brand. If you notice that a lot of people use words like “helpful”, “efficient” or “excellent,” you’ll know that you’re heading in the right direction.
If you notice words that are typically associated with poor service or inefficiency, don’t make the assumption that these comments are from internet trolls or people who want to gloat at your failure. There might be some validity to the conversation. Instead, dig a little deeper to find commonalities. These might be indicators that people aren’t really pleased or interested in the services you provide. You don’t want to specialize in providing irrelevant products or services to the marketplace. Start by getting clear about what people are actually saying.
Satisfaction vs. Dissatisfaction
By using various social media analytics programs, you can closely monitor the mentions and sentiments of the people who talk about your brand. While there are a number of analytics programs you can utilize, the overall sentiment analysis on social media should be the same because you’re looking at the same data. If 50% of the people in your demographic are talking about your brand in a negative way, you’ll want to consider what you recently produced that caused that conversation.
As a business, you do have the choice to focus on improving the positive, improving the negative or facilitating both. Though many business owners want to improve both, there are times when it might be more effective to really hone in on what the company does well and maximize that. The facts that aren’t so great might not matter in the grand scheme of things. As you make the decision between satisfaction versus dissatisfaction, consider what will make the greatest return on your investment. By looking at the stats of your sentiment analysis, it’ll be a lot easier to maintain a pulse on how people continue to perceive your company and interact with it.
Conducting a sentiment analysis for your business can be understandably intimidating. When you own the company, you have a vested interest in making sure people love and accept it. Plus, as you put your blood, sweat and tears into building a great business, it can be pretty disappointing when people aren’t interested in what you provide. However, it’s best to develop a thick skin if you’d like to continue in business. As you continue to learn more about what people want, it’ll become much easier to maintain your current customers and gain new ones. With each improvement in your customer experience, you’ll probably experience an improvement in sales and profitability as well. Therefore, it’s worth the effort.
