Social Sentiment

Brand Perceptions and Brand Equity.

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Social Media KPI Example - Social Sentiment Metric

The goal of social sentiment analysis is to understand the general feeling or attitude of the public toward the subject in question.

Why Social Sentiment is Important

Social Sentiment about brands plays out in brand mentions across a wide variety of digital channels, from social media to blogs to press releases. Advanced social listening and analytics platforms like Hootsuite, Brandwatch, and Talkwalker help brands understand the sentiment behind brand mentions, equipping them with the information they need to engage in the right conversations at the right time to keep the brand strategy on track.

Social sentiment analysis involves categorizing each brand mention as ‘negative’, ‘positive’ or ‘neutral’ to the brand. How are mentions categorized? “We analyze each word and give them a tone” says Jeremy Bernier, Strategic Partner Manager at Talkwalker. Each word is assigned a number of points: “happy is positive (+ 5), and unhappy ( -5) is negative.” “On top of this we have a Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine which allows the platform to understand the grammatical structure of the sentence”, says Bernier. “I am not happy” is negative even if the word ‘happy’ is in the sentence because of the negation that precedes it”.

Social Sentiment Benchmark

There is no established benchmark for social sentiment because consumers engage in social media differently depending on the product or service. But benchmarks are important, so what do you do?! Luckily, Hootsuite, Brandwatch and Talkwalker benchmark your brand against your closest competition.

Social Sentiment Challenges

Bernier acknowledges that machines won’t be able to analyze the sentiment behind mentions as accurately as humans as they don’t understand humour or irony. However, utilizing these tools, “social sentiment analysis is accurate 70-75% of the time”, he says. Also, social sentiment works best with large amounts of data.

Social Sentiment Best Practices

Moz

  • It’s essential that you understand the methodology behinds the social sentiment platform you use--especially the margin of error--to help you understand the context of your reports.
  • It’s good to always keep an eye on the social sentiment of your brand, but it’s especially important to check sentiment before and after a campaign to determine campaign success.

How to Monitor Your Social Sentiment in Real-time

Once you have established benchmarks and targets for measuring Social Sentiment, you’ll want to establish processes for monitoring this and other social media KPIs. Dashboards can be critical in this regard.

Learn more about how to track your Social Sentiment on a Social Media Dashboard.

Social Sentiment: Top Resources

On Social Sentiment and Sentiment Analysis, Ben Donker

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