What began as a socializing app for students at Harvard University to stay in touch with each other later expanded into a three billion-user-strong social media behemoth. The numbers alone point to a real shift in how marketers and businesses view these platforms in terms of their marketing and business strategies. Social media has become the ‘IT’ thing as more companies focus on their online presence to attract customers.
However, getting the customers’ pulse from these social media platforms requires a more tech-savvy approach. This is where sentiment analysis comes into play which uses the latest technological innovations related to AI-natural language processing models to predict human sentiments in simple text. It gathers information from social media platforms and extracts useful insights for businesses to formulate their business plans.
The Functionality of Social Media Sentiment Analysis
Social media sentiment analysis is the gauging of public sentiments via employing different text analytics tools to extract key insights from a given text. The text is the social media interactions of users across multiple platforms. It can be in the form of blogs, comments underneath the blog posts, forum posts, and simple tweets and status updates. All these sources combine to form the database from which the sentiment analysis tools extract useful insights.
Using complex algorithms and the latest tech innovations, such as artificial intelligence, social media sentiment analysis uncovers the hidden emotions of users across online platforms. It quantifies such emotions and sentiments in a manner that is beneficial for business entities and organizations. The social media sentiment analysis model can be broken down into small steps for easy understanding.
The first step is data collection from various online sources, and the next step is to start analyzing the data through different algorithms and social media text analytics tools. The text analytics tools break downs the text into understandable components by the machines, which further tag the text based on the sentiment or emotions they’re expressing. This sentiment scoring is done so that the program can visualize the results in the form of graphs, pie charts, or lists for easy understanding.
Benefits of Using Sentiment Analysis Tools on Social Media
Staying ahead of your competition is a key parameter for businesses these days. You can accomplish this by improving your products or looking at your competition and avoiding their mistakes. Sentiment analysis tools help extract essential information from social media and help businesses get useful insights about their business or products.
These simple text analytics tools can help organizations save millions on misplaced marketing campaigns. Social media sentiment analysis tools come with many benefits, some of which are:
Understanding Target Audience
Sentiment analysis tools help businesses extract key information from millions of data points. For example, a random post about someone talking about your product can snowball into a flurry of comments. Now, these comments can be positive or negative, discerning which can be done either manually or by using AI natural language processing bases tools such as sentiment analysis.
These analysis tools get you closer to what the customers truly feel about your brand. These comments offer actionable insights that an organization can work on to improve its products or continue in a direction that customers favor.
Feedback is King
A successful entrepreneur will always stress about the importance of customer feedback. It is this feedback that organizations rely on to improve their services and remove any deficiencies. Manually getting feedback from surveys and questionnaires is still an important way to go about things; however, by leveraging the power of social media sentiment analysis tools, organizations can get real-time feedback efficiently.
Such feedback is crucial for the survival of an organization, and sentiment analysis has all the answers to get you this coveted feedback. More importantly, these text analytics tools laced with AI natural language processing prowess help you get the context behind the feedback and deliver it as soon as users express these comments online.
Better Marketing and Product Management
Getting inside the head of your customers is the dream of any organization. This valuable feedback is what companies thrive upon, and they also make content based on these insights to further their brand reach. Knowing what the customer wants gives you the exact blueprint for successful marketing campaigns. You can increase your brand reach by engaging with customers online in a more informed manner.
Furthermore, social media sentiment analysis ultimately leads to a better product development cycle. With customer feedback at its back, organizations can produce award-winning products. The product lifecycle will be subject to many iterations that will definitely help improve the product overall in line with the sentiment analysis results obtained.
Crises Management and Brand Reputation
For any brand to navigate the murky waters of social media ire and negative reviews, it is important for real-time insights. Social media sentiment analysis tools help get you valuable insights as they happen so that you can put on fire fighting skills to good use. Negativity spreads on social media like wildfire and thus process to be detrimental to the health of any organization.
Saving the organization’s reputation, brand, and product requires skill and tact. More importantly, it requires the pulse of the customers, which can be obtained via text analytics tools and, in this case, sentiment analysis tools. An organization can proactively course correct negative reviews over the internet based on accurate information and thus manage to save their reputation.
Best Tools in the Market to Conduct Sentiment Analysis on Social Media
Social media is a modern innovation requiring equal tech-savviness and ingenuity to extract useful information. Social media sentiment analysis tools are one solution that brings valuable insights into customers’ minds. Such insights help formulate marketing campaigns for businesses. Let’s look at the tools that are behind this revolution.
Text Analytics
Whenever we talk about sentiment analysis, there will definitely be a mention of text analytics. So what is text analytics, and how does it differentiate from its more illustrious neighbors in AI and NLP? Text analytics is a simple tool that breaks down a given text into its components that can then be understood by computers, aka machines. It is the first step in sentiment analysis where the extracted text is then fed into algorithms to understand the context and collate sentiment scores.
Natural Language Processing
AI natural language processing is a field that has revolutionized the way we see written text. With the help of NLP, businesses and organizations can understand the online text without needing to manually sift through the posts. A critical tool used to perform social media sentiment analysis, NLP has raked in plaudits from all over. It is the phenomenon behind machines learning to understand textual inputs like humans do and even talk or compose sentences.
Tips & Tricks for Conducting Accurate Sentiment Analysis
Like any other technology, it is critical that you incorporate the human element when performing the analysis portion of sentiment analysis. For example, sometimes, the AI natural language processing model may not be able to discern a sarcastic tone in an otherwise complementary post. The human element must be utilized when performing the final analysis on any sentiment analysis. Here are some other tips to efficiently perform social media sentiment analysis.
- Set Clear Goals – You must plan and define a clear set of goals you want out of sentiment analysis. A clear plan will go a long way in getting you the right results, and extra information will not distract you from achieving the requisite sentiment analysis.
- Training the Model – While the NLP model may be self-sufficient in churning out effective sentiment analysis, you can improve the results by training the machine learning model. This tailor-made training will result in more accurate results to your set objectives.
- Regular Monitoring – While the sentiment analysis model may offer you real-time insights into the customer’s mind, it is important to monitor such insights regularly. The key outputs generated by a sentiment analysis tool are still user-dependent and thus require vigilance.
- Importance of Relevant Data – It is crucial that you select the right medium for data extraction phase of the sentiment analysis model. The sentiment analysis tool can extract information for its model from various sources. If you can point the model in the right direction by pinpointing the correct platform to extract data from, you will have a winning formula for performing sentiment analysis.
Get the Right Tool
As mentioned above, selecting the correct tool is paramount when performing sentiment analysis. Choosing the right sentiment analysis tool and setting clear goals to achieve perfect results is important. The top sentiment analysis tools help propel your business to new heights as they offer social media sentiment analysis based on latest customer feedback.
These tools offer top-notch text analytics along with text visualization for a better understanding of unstructured social media texts. They also work well with social media analysis of feeds and posts by extracting useful information into pictorial representations such as tag clouds and network diagrams.
