{"id":1315,"date":"2019-08-08T07:32:49","date_gmt":"2019-08-08T07:32:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.revuze.it\/?p=1315"},"modified":"2019-08-08T07:32:49","modified_gmt":"2019-08-08T07:32:49","slug":"what-is-social-sentiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revuze.it\/blog\/what-is-social-sentiment\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is Social Sentiment?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Social media sentiment\u2014commonly referred to as \u201csocial sentiment\u201d\u2014is the feeling or attitude people express on social media regarding a specific brand, service, or product. Social sentiments are usually <\/span>expressed through posts or comments<\/b> on networks like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, and so on. For businesses that care about managing their image and their brand reputation, social sentiments are crucial to gather data on their consumers and on their competitors.<\/span><\/p>\n

In this blog post, we will discuss in detail what social sentiments are, why they are important for brands, and how they can be used to improve branding and marketing strategies overall.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why Is Social Sentiment Important For Brands?<\/b><\/h2>\n

Whether a company has an active presence on social media or not, the company\u2019s consumers and users most likely do. On social media, people <\/span>speak their minds<\/span><\/i>; they express their <\/span>opinions<\/b> about politics, shopping, technology, and so on; many people ask for <\/span>recommendations<\/b> on Facebook (examples: \u201cWhat\u2019s the best online translation service?\u201d or \u201cCan anyone recommend a good website to edit photos?\u201d) and exchange thoughts. In addition, many people rate and write <\/span>reviews<\/b> on businesses and services\u2014restaurants in particular\u2014online using Google and Yelp.<\/span><\/p>\n

The bottom line is, many people are having online conversations about your brand. In those conversations, they\u2019re probably expressing their \u201csocial sentiments.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

You may think that\u2019s great: It\u2019s publicity! Awesome! That\u2019s partially true\u2014the fact that people are talking about your brand or business means that it\u2019s relevant enough. But those posts, tweets, comments, and reviews are not necessarily positive; many of them are likely to be negative or critical, and in some cases their words can be very harmful for your business.<\/span><\/p>\n

While you cannot (and should NOT) control social sentiments, you can definitely use them as a tool to improve your product or service or to improve your marketing and branding efforts.<\/span><\/p>\n

Social sentiments are important for brands in particular for two reasons:<\/span><\/h3>\n
    \n
  1. They give you insights on your audience<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. They help you analyze the Voice of Customer (VoC)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    If your goal is to maximize the potential of your customer\u2019s experience, social sentiments can offer you a valuable glimpse into the thoughts and attitudes your customers have towards your product, as well as the products of your competitors. Social sentiments are precious data that can be analyzed to understand what works and what doesn\u2019t, what they love and what they hate, what could be improved and what should remain the same. Later in the article, we\u2019ll look closer at how the data can be analyzed (hint: it has to do with\u2026 sentiment analysis).<\/span><\/p>\n

    Paying attention to social sentiment is a way to make the \u201cVoice of Customer\u201d (VoC) heard. Think about it: A negative customer experience can result into a negative social sentiment, which can result in losing your customer, damaging your brand and public image, and realizing that that your product or customer service are not good enough. By listening closely to the VoC, you can prevent, avoid, or minimize these issues.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Paying attention is also important because companies that succeed are usually very aware of the surrounding environment, they monitor their audience and their competitors, as opposed to being narrow-minded and disregard the \u201cnoise\u201d that might take place outside their headquarters.<\/span><\/p>\n

    How Social Sentiment Helps With Customer Experience Analysis<\/b><\/h2>\n

    Let\u2019s say your company experiences a massive surge in tweets mentioning the brand\u2019s name, Facebook comments, and so on. There\u2019s some buzz surrounding your brand! There\u2019s a conversation going on! Something must have happened.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Obviously, the buzz is not necessarily good news, because not all publicity is good publicity. There is a saying in Hollywood that making it into the gossip headlines, whether it\u2019s for good or bad reasons, is always good publicity; that definitely does not apply to communications, branding, and marketing. Some negative publicity and social media buzz can have devastating effects on your business; however, the earlier you detect it, the better you can handle the situation; in some cases, you can even turn a bad situation into a great one!<\/span><\/p>\n

    How social sentiment work?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

    First of all, companies do something called \u201c<\/span>social listening<\/b>\u201d or \u201csocial media monitoring.\u201d They use a social listening software to monitor social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and automatically detect all comments, posts, public conversations, and tweets that mention your product or brand. Think if you had to do this manually\u2014it would be expensive, time-consuming, and you may easily miss some of these tweets.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Social media monitoring will help you gather all social sentiments.<\/span><\/p>\n

    At this point, you need to use a <\/span>sentiment analysis tool<\/b> to analyze the data you\u2019ve gathered and classify it as \u201cpositive,\u201d \u201cneutral,\u201d or \u201cnegative.\u201d A refined sentiment analysis software, like the one developed by Revuze, can give a score to the social sentiment and help you distinguish between different degrees of positivity and negativity; in fact, some opinions might be mixed!<\/span><\/p>\n

    If you want to learn more about sentiment analysis, you should check out Revuze\u2019s detailed <\/span>article<\/span><\/a> about the topic, which explains how sentiment analysis works and how it\u2019s used by different companies.<\/span><\/p>\n

    If you\u2019re also curious to learn more about text analytics, the technology used to analyze a piece of writing automatically, you can read this other blog post entitled <\/span>\u201cWhat Is Text Analytics?\u201d<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Once you\u2019ve built your database of positive, neutral, and negative sentiments, usually restricted to a specific time period or even a specific geographic area, you can calculate the <\/span>net sentiment<\/b>. It\u2019s very simple. The net sentiment is the net value of all those opinions expressed on social media about your brand or product. You can calculate it in two ways:<\/span><\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Total positive mentions PLUS total neutral mentions MINUS total negative mentions.<\/span><\/li>\n
    2. Total positive mentions MINUS total negative mentions.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      You can decide which way to use depending on how much weight you want to give to the neutral mentions. Depending on the situation, you might want to pay more or less attention to those neutral mentions.<\/span><\/p>\n

      Social sentiment analysis can also help you calculate the \u201c<\/span>net promoter score<\/b>.\u201d Commonly, customers are categorized depending on their feedback into three groups: (a) promoters (enthusiastic about your product, likely to recommend it to others), (b) passives (satisfied but not loyal), (c) detractors (unhappy customers who might want to damage the reputation of your brand).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

      Similarly to the net sentiment, we can calculate the net promoter score by detracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.<\/span><\/p>\n

      Ways to Use Social Sentiment<\/b><\/h2>\n

      Here are some of the most common ways to use social sentiments.<\/span><\/p>\n