Leverage Sentiment Analysis

What is Sentiment Analysis?

Simply put, sentiment analysis is a tool that allows you to extract the emotion behind any text. Also referred to as opinion mining, it is a process used to identify the tone conveyed by any text. Other metrics may let you know what is happening, but oftentimes, they will not unravel the ‘how’ and ‘why.’ They might also fail to give you context, and that is where opinion mining comes in.

It essentially entails figuring out the general feelings about your business, demystifying the emotions that customers express when someone mentions your brand. Wherever there is user-generated content, with users freely speaking their minds, you can gauge sentiment. Some of the most common areas where this takes place include social media channels, product review sites and online communities.

How to Use Sentiment Analysis

It goes without saying that the type of sentiment surrounding your brand can either enhance business performance or work against it. The general mood surrounding a particular product or the overall image of a brand exerts considerable impact on its success or lack thereof. Thanks to the internet, buyers now have the advantage of carrying out extensive research before making a purchase. More than anything else, consumers trust user-generated content. This presents a worthwhile opportunity to create a positive reputation and drive business.

How can you use this tool to your brand’s benefit? Consider three main ways you could leverage sentiment analysis to enhance your business performance:

1. Detect and Manage Crises in their Infancy Stage Even the best brands experience forest fires that rage out of control at one time or another. There are no guarantees that your business is immune. Instead of hoping and praying that it does not happen to you and getting caught off-guard, prepare for such eventualities ahead of time.

2. Consistently Measure Reputation Trends To get a clear picture of the public’s perception of your brand, make it a habit to measure reputations trends. Keeping an eye on it regularly will offer insights regarding your business performance at any given time. You want to see how the emotions around your brand evolve over time and the causes behind significant changes.

3. Carry Out Competitive Analysis In the same way that you always want to know the tone around your brand, it is also important to keep an eye out for the emotions surrounding your competitors. Whenever sentiment seems to favor the competition, you can draw inspiration to guide your own moves to drive similar feelings.

Benefits of Sentiment Analysis

Now that we have an idea of how we should leverage sentiment to enhance brand performance, take a look at some of the benefits you can gain from the exercise:

1. Better Decision-Making

2. Enhancing Customer Experience

3. Optimizing Marketing Strategy and Adjusting

4. Gaining Competitive Advantage

Automated Sentiment Analysis through Machine Learning

When you have a small amount of data from which you can analyze customer sentiment, simply reading through the text suffices. But this quickly becomes impractical as the amount of data expands in volume. This is where automated analysis through machine learning comes in.

A sentiment analysis algorithm essentially converts a flood of data into useful, actionable insights. In the past, machine learning models have had challenges in analyzing sentiment as they would fail to consider context. For instance, identifying rhetorical models such as irony and sarcasm has always been challenging.

However, thanks to advances in feature engineering, current models can now recognize tone, context and previous sentiment indicators. The result has been a far more accurate model that is better able to streamline the analysis process.

Make the Most of the Opportunity

In business, sentiment analysis is so much more than a trend. It holds the potential to provide a breakthrough and completely revitalize a brand. However, in order to achieve this, you would need to ensure that your approach is foolproof.

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