Social Sentiment Monitoring: Should you be doing it?

Have you heard of social sentiment monitoring? It can be a handy tool for social media marketers who want to know how customers feel about their brand. In this article, we’ll dive into what exactly social sentiment monitoring is if it's worth adding to your to-do list and a little bit about how it’s done.

What is it? 

According to Hootsuite, “Social media sentiment analysis is the process of collecting and analysing information on how people talk about your brand on social media. Rather than a simple count of mentions or comments, sentiment analysis considers emotions and opinions.”

In other words, it’s like opinion mining across the web, where you dig into the words and conversations of people talking about your brand and pick up on the general opinions.

Should you be doing it?

Well, firstly you need to know if people are even talking about your brand or business. If your company is relatively new, there may not be much of a conversation around your brand yet. In this case, you can stick to your regular social scheduling and analytics.

However, if you are an established brand in New Zealand or anywhere in the world with a relatively large following, tracking your social sentiment is a fantastic idea. Here are a few reasons why: 

1.     It can help you understand your audience: 

Imagine eavesdropping on a conversation about you. If the gossipers are unaware of your presence, they’ll be brutally honest about their opinions. A similar thing happens on social media; most posters assume the brand won’t see what they are saying and just want to vent. Other times, they deliberately make a post to get the attention of a brand. In either situation, and whether it's positive or negative, listen in to see what your audience is saying. You can understand what makes them happy, annoyed and some ways to improve your service if needed! 

2. You will improve customer service: 

If you understand your audience, you’ll be able to speak their language. Your customer service interactions will get a boost as you can be more empathetic towards your customer's needs after monitoring what they're saying. 

3. You can tweak your offering: 

When you started your brand, you most likely did some competitor analysis and market research. Now you have an established brand, researching your offering will give you great insight into what changes you can make. Your audience will have their ideas on what works and what doesn’t; take this all into consideration. You may find some golden recommendations in there!

4. You can spot a crisis before it happens, and stop it from happening.  

This is a major perk to social sentiment monitoring. If your brand has suffered any major mishaps or crises in the public eye before, this will be your best tool in making sure it doesn’t happen again. As you track negative feedback, you can notice if a spike is occurring and work on putting out the fire before it becomes an inferno. 

So, how can I track my social sentiment?

There are a bunch of great paid tools that track your brand’s vibe on the web for you. However, if you’re tight on a budget (like many businesses in the recession), you can do D.I.Y social sentiment analysis. Here’s how. 

1. Monitor mentions: 

Most platforms allow you to monitor your mentions and receive a notification when someone tags or hashtags you. On Instagram, you can follow specific hashtags so they show up In your feed. [MB1] Be aware that people won’t always tag your brand, but social media search is pretty amazing nowadays. Just pop your brand name in the search bar of whichever platform you are on and it should uncover any public content people are sharing about your company. 

2. Analyse the vibe

Now you can pull what you have found and analyse it as data. It’s best to split it into positive and negative feedback, most content will be one or the other! You can try filtering with keywords like amazing, best, awesome or “disappointing, terrible, horrible.”

Split the content between each group in an Excel spreadsheet and create a sheet for each month/period that you are tracking. 

3.     Calculate your social sentiment score

So, is your feedback mostly positive or negative? It’s time to calculate your score! There are a few ways you can do this;

• Positive mentions as a percentage of total mentions

• Positive mentions as a percentage of mentions that include sentiment (removing neutral mentions)

Whichever way you choose, make sure you keep it consistent each month to avoid skewed data. 

Got a bad score? Here are some ways to improve it.

If your result was less than desirable, don’t stress. You’ve taken the best first step by tracking your social sentiment. Now let’s look at some ways to shift the tide and make your community feel positive about your brand again. 

1.What’s making your audience unhappy? Change it. 

This may seem obvious, but if you take a good look at your complaints and see how to tweak them, your audience will notice and feel listened to. You can’t change your whole business model, but adopting a “the customer is always right” mentality can sometimes really boost your brand. 

2. Engage with your audience.

When you see feedback, engage with it! Reply to comments, and comment on posts tagging you; if your audience knows you are listening and engaging with them, they will see that you care about them. Community management is a must-have in your company’s social media strategy. 

3.      Build on your strengths. 

We’ve focussed a lot on negative feedback, but your positive feedback is also brand gold! Check out what your audience is loving about your brand and build on it! 

4.      Be transparent. 

In the current “TikTok era”, where social media users are turning their noses at Instagram-style perfection and opting for more behind-the-scenes, authentic content – users want to see transparency from brands. This means admitting to mistakes and keeping it real and honest about changes to your brand. Companies that show vulnerability encourage a closer relationship with their followers, often get more engagement and can begin building a relationship between their users and the brand.

It's a great way to turn a negative into a positive and create brand loyalty and trust. 

Short on time?

Want to track your social sentiment, but short on time? Let Matter Agency - New Zealand’s experts in social media branding and marketing - take care of this for you. Contact us today.