Social Media Sentiment Analysis: Tools and Tips for 2022
How do people feel about your brand – right now? This question may seem basic. But it can be critical for marketers as it needs to inform every aspect of your content and marketing strategies.
Social media sentiment analysis gives brands the ability to track online conversations about themselves and their competitors in real time. At the same time, they receive quantitative information about how positively or negatively they are perceived.
Social media sentiment analysis ensures that you know how each brand’s choice influences brand loyalty and customer perception.
This may sound difficult. But there are plenty of tools to help you collect and analyze the social data you need to accurately understand where your brand is at.
Social media sentiment analysis is the process of collecting and analyzing information about how people talk about your brand on social media. Sentiment analysis takes into account not just the count of mentions or comments, but emotions and opinions.
Social media sentiment analysis is sometimes referred to as “opinion analysis”. “That’s because it’s all about digging into the words and context of social media posts to understand the opinions they reveal.
Measuring social sentiment is an important part of any social media monitoring plan.
In the next section, we’ll look at some of the powerful tools you can use to make social sentiment analysis faster, easier, and more accurate.
But if you’re not yet ready to invest in specialized social media sentiment analysis tools, you can start with a little more research.
1. Keep track of your mentions
The first step in social media sentiment analysis is to find people’s conversations about your brand online. The problem is, they won’t always tag you in those conversations.
Luckily, you can set up Hootsuite streams to track social feeds for all mentions of your brand, even if you’re not tagged. Here’s how to collect them all in one place.
On the Hootsuite dashboard, add a thread for each of your social accounts. This will track mentions when people tag your social media accounts.
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You might want to organize all of your mention streams on a social mention board so they’re easier to browse at a glance.
On some social networks, you can even track posts that don’t tag you:
- On Instagram, you can track hashtags related to your products or brand.
- For Twitter, you can use hashtags or keywords.
Be sure to create flows for your brand and the name of your product or service.
Again, the whiteboard can be a useful way to organize all of these threads on one screen.
To learn more about how to set up tracking for your mentions, check out our full article on social media listening tools.
2. Analyze the mood of your mentions
You will then look for terms that indicate the mood of your mentions. Consider what positive or negative words people might use when talking about your brand. Examples may include:
- Positive: love, amazing, great, best, perfect
- Negative: bad, terrible, terrible, worst, hate
There will most likely be other terms related to your product, brand, or industry. Make a list of positive and negative words and review your mentions for posts containing these terms.
For Twitter, you can set up Hootsuite to do some of this work automatically. In the toolbar, create a search thread using your name plus:) to signify a positive mood. Then create a search thread using your name plus: (to signify a negative attitude.
If you’re tracking mood manually, keep in mind that you need to keep track of context. Is someone being sarcastic when they say they have the “best”customer experience with your brand?
3. Calculate Your Social Sentiment Score
You can calculate the Social Sentiment Score in several ways:
- Positive mentions as a percentage of the total number of mentions
- Positive mentions as a percentage of mentions containing mood (removal of neutral mentions)
Which method you use doesn’t really matter as long as you are consistent. This is because the most important thing to keep an eye on is change.
The second method always gives a higher score.
As we just said, Hootsuite is a powerful tool for gathering the data needed for sentiment analysis. These tools go one step further by providing you with this analysis.
1. Hootsuite Analytics by Brandwatch
Powered by Brandwatch, Hootsuite Insights allows you to use detailed logical search strings to automatically monitor social sentiment. You’ll also get word clouds showing the most common words used to describe your brand. Plus, charts that compare your social sentiments to those of your competitors.
In addition to positive and negative sentiments, Hootsuite Insights tracks certain emotions such as anger and joy over time. This allows you to look for sudden changes or current trends. You can also filter sentiment by location or demographics to see how sentiment varies based on your audience. There is also an AI analysis option to automatically identify the causes of significant sentiment changes.
Alerts is another handy feature that allows you to be notified of sudden mood changes. Then you can get ahead of any problems before they get out of hand.
2. Methionlytics
The Mentionlytics presentation is: “Find out everything that is being said about your brand, your competitors, or any keyword.”
You can expand your search to see what people are saying about your brand online. There is a built-in sentiment analysis feature that works in multiple languages.
3. Digital mind
Digimind identifies and analyzes all relevant conversations about your brand and competitors.
It pulls information from over 850 million web sources, so you know you’re getting a comprehensive view of your brand’s attitude.
You can also analyze mentions and apply filters to customize your sentiment analysis process.
4. Crowd analyzer
Crowd Analyzer is a social media listening and sentiment analysis tool in Arabic. This is especially important for brands with an Arabic-speaking target audience. Other social sentiment tools generally lack the ability to recognize sentiment in Arabic messages.
Source: Hootsuite App Catalog.
5. Talk Walker
TalkWalker collects information from over 150 million sources. The tool then uses artificial intelligence to analyze sentiment, tone, emotion, and more.
Our social media sentiment report template provides the structure you need to create an effective report that you can share with your team.
To use a template, click the File tab, then click Make a Copy. This gives you your own copy of the template that you can use whenever you need to create a new social sentiment report.
The benefits of social media sentiment tracking are a bit round. For example, tracking social sentiment will help you better understand your audience, which in turn will help improve social sentiment.
So, if you’ve been paying attention to the benefits section above, these strategies may sound a little familiar to you…
- Know your audience: When you know your audience well, you can create posts that resonate with them. Basically, it comes down to this: give your audience more of what they want and less of what they don’t want.
- Engagement: Respond to comments, mentions, and direct messages. Maximize positive interactions by ensuring that any negative mentions are quickly resolved.
- Use your strengths: Use social sentiment to understand what your audience thinks well of your brand and what they think not so much. While you work to improve areas that are lagging behind, play along with your strengths. Deliver value by staying true to your brand.
Simply counting your social media mentions only tells you how many people are talking about your brand online. But what do they say? Social media sentiment analysis will help you answer this question.
After all, a large number of mentions can look great at first glance. But if it’s a storm of negative posts, it might not be all that great.
In July, BMW social media mentions skyrocketed, but engagement was not positive. There was confusion over a planned decision to sell subscription services for automotive features. The tweet that really set things off got nearly 30,000 retweets and 225,000 likes.
It’s crazy – BMW is now selling a monthly subscription to heated seats in your car.
• Monthly fee: $18 • Yearly fee: $180
The car will be with all the necessary components, but you will need to pay for the removal of the software unit.
Welcome to microtransaction hell.
— Joe Pompliano (@JoePompliano) July 12, 2022
If the company just counted the mentions, they might think they did something very right.
But the mood behind this increased activity was primarily negative. BMW has been forced to refine its subscription plans.
Let’s talk about heated seats… ⤵️
— BMW USA (@BMWUSA) July 14, 2022
This is why your brand needs to track social sentiment.
1. Understand your audience
Marketers work best when they understand their audience. This means you need to understand how your audience feels about your brand, your social media posts, and your campaigns, not just how often they mention you.
For example, White Castle used social listening and sentiment analysis to discover that their clients had a positive association with a very specific experience of eating White Castle sliders while watching TV in bed.
With that knowledge in hand, White Castle featured a couple eating toddlers in bed for their next campaign.
Source: White Castle ad via eMarketer Industry Voices.
Constant analysis of social media sentiment can also quickly alert you to changing customer preferences and desires.
2. Improve customer service
Sentiment monitoring provides two main benefits for customer service and support:
- It can alert your teams to any new or emerging issues. You can even find out about issues with a specific product launch or product. You can then prepare your team, or even create social content that addresses issues directly.
- You can get in touch with people who might have a difficult experience with your brand early on. A simple response or follow-up action can often go a long way in resolving a client’s problem before they contact your team.
In this example, the Adobe customer support team on Twitter was able to resolve the issue and keep the customer happy, even if they weren’t tagged.
Feel free to contact when needed. Thank you. ^RS
— Adobe Care (@AdobeCare) September 26, 2022
3. Customize brand messages and product development
By following trends and exploring spikes in positive, negative, or neutral sentiment, you can find out what your audience really wants. This can give you a clearer idea of what messages you should post on each social network.
You may even receive information that can influence your overall brand strategy and product development.
For example, Zoom tracked their social sentiment to uncover the biggest negative myths about their product. They then created a series of TikTok videos to bust those myths and build customer confidence.
@zoom
They also created a series of “Tips for the Pros”videos to answer the most frequently asked questions on social media, thereby reducing the burden on the customer service team and highlighting new features. Some ideas for new features even came from social listening and analysis.
@zoom Answer @im_siowei giving the people what they want ✨ @Matt Head #zoom #focusmode #zoommeeting #fyp #december
4. Understand where you are in your niche
Brands cannot be everything to all people. Social sentiment can help you understand where you are in your business niche. This, in turn, can help you reach the right audience with the right messages at the right time.
For example, the production team at media company Underknown launched a YouTube channel called “According to Science.”They told stories based on scientific research. But after 60 videos, the channel did not grow.
After reviewing their data, the team realized that survival videos received the most positive feedback. They changed their whole strategy and launched a new channel called How to Survive. In just 18 months, the channel gained a million subscribers on YouTube.
When they discovered that their most positive reviews came from Americans between the ages of 18 and 34, they continued to adapt by creating short videos that live on TikTok and regularly rack up over a million views.
@howtosurvive.show Let’s see if this video stays up ?? #HowToSurvive #SurvivalSkills #DoNotAttempt #educationalpurposes #Survivalist #FloridaMan #Crocodile
Analyzing social media sentiment can also help you understand what areas of your business you’re really good at and what you might need to improve.
5. Spot Brand Crises Early
You never want your brand to go into crisis. But if it does, monitoring social sentiment can help you spot the problem early. You can implement your crisis response plan to minimize negative sentiment or avoid it entirely.
In the example above, it took the car company BMW 48 hours to respond to the heated seat controversy on Twitter and another day to post an official statement on its website. By then, the issue had received extensive media coverage, making it harder for BMW to repair the damage. If they responded within a day, they might be able to correct the narrative before it gets out of hand.
Setting up automatic alerts for bursts of mentions and sentiment is an important early warning system for brand crisis management.
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