How to Understand Customers With Social Media Sentiment Analysis

Can sentiment analysis predict the future of our country? We think so. Despite predictions forecasting an easy win for Hillary Clinton, social media marketers did a better job predicting Trump’s win than the polls. And politics aren’t the only place for sentiment analysis—from restaurants and hospitality to accounting and employee satisfaction, our data-driven Chicago digital marketing firm is finding new ways to utilize sentiment analysis.

How Does It Work?

Sentiment analysis combines linguistic processing and data science to evaluate subjective information. Qualitative data has traditionally been difficult to measure, but speech and text can be easily scraped and quantified with language comprehension tools. Sentiment analysis uses word associations and psychology to understand the strength and polarity of expressed emotions or attitudes. It can also find trending products or services and help marketers understand the language consumers use when discussing a brand.

Text processing is the simplest form of sentiment analysis, and rich libraries of logic chains can inspect grammar to find the subject, object, and emotion of given text. Websites, forums, articles, reviews, social media posts, and private messages are some of the data points available, and as data science evolves it won’t be unreasonable to have a single dashboard to monitor multiple channels with customizable analytics.

Audio and video processing is much more complicated, but the volume of data being collected is promising. Apple, Amazon, and Google use machine learning and artificial intelligence to understand and predict human needs during voice interaction, and integration with smartphones and tablets increases the sample size for data scientists to use.

Analysis In Action

Brand and reputation management software helps marketers understand consumer perception, identify influencers, track competition, monitor campaign effectiveness, and actively take part in real-time dialogue with their audience. This is where hashtags are unbelievably valuable. Marketers can find and track trending hashtags in real time to study how customer sentiment develops with new products and services. Public relations teams can respond to and monitor incidents and breaking news. Analysts can even tie that information into financial data to correlate trends with stock prices.

Consumers aren’t the only beneficiaries of sentiment analysis. In a recent case study, Mabbly analyzed employee reviews for the Boston Consulting Group. We found key factors in employee satisfaction and pain points of previous hires. Takeaways show a 50% increase in employee satisfaction from close friendships, and office politics with unfair work distribution being a major contributor for employees leaving. In competitive markets where attracting and retaining key talent affects the bottom line, sentiment analysis is providing human resource departments with better data for employee management.

How Can I Start?

Sentiment analysis is a powerful tool early in its development stage, and forward-thinking agencies are taking notice. As a premier Chicago digital marketing firm, our data-driven approach is on the leading edge of sentiment analysis and empirical digital market research. If you’re not getting the most from your marketing, contact Mabbly today.