Brand sentiment analysis is what you need when you want to measure your brand’s health. Social media sentiment analysis helps you find out what people say about your brand when you are not (tagged or mentioned) there.
The success of your brand depends on what customers and potential customers think and say about your business.
Also known as opinion mining or emotion AI, sentiment analysis will open the door of a new world for you in which you will be able to better interact and connect with your audience.
Keep in mind that your happiness depends on your audience’s happiness. Let’s learn together the most important things about brand sentiment analysis.
Brand Sentiment Analysis - A Complete Guide
- Read brand customer reviews
- Understand your audience
- Spot an eventual crisis
- Gather actionable insights
- Develop a campaign performance analysis
- Find opportunities to improve
- Improve customer service
- Run a competitive analysis
1. What is brand sentiment analysis and why is it useful
A brand sentiment analysis is a process through which you evaluate the audience’s opinion about your brand, services and products.
To analyze your community’s sentiment, you need monitoring tools. This is the only way you can do it because it’s impossible to manually search for every mention of your brand in the online world.
Social media sentiment analysis will help you get a grasp of what people think about your every campaign.
During your marketing campaigns, it’s advisable to check brand sentiment several times to see how users’ perspective about your brand changes.
In case they have objections or negative feedback, you should work on customizing your campaign to their needs and desires.
Brand sentiment should be on your list of most important metrics, helping you keep track of the latest trends and learning how to constantly adapt.
This type of analysis is very useful since you can discover a lot more things about the relationship between your brand and your audience.
Let’s see why social media sentiment analysis is useful.
Read brand customer reviews
Not all your customers are bound to leave a review or feedback about your products or services, unless they are really happy or really disappointed. And trust me, you’d want them to be really happy.
However, by reading all the reviews you get on your social media platforms helps you improve your products, services and even the relationship you built with your clients.
If you use a brand sentiment analysis tool, you will be able to spot even the “masked” reviews, where your brand is not tagged or mentioned, getting even more insights.
Understand your audience
When you receive a lot of reviews from your customers, you get to notice patterns related to what people expect and want from you and your products.
This way, you also perform a getting-to-know-your-audience session that will help you when planning your future campaigns.
Spot an eventual crisis
Many of the brands which don’t react immediately to the critics they receive usually regret it afterwards. If you allow complaints to pile up, the results will be catastrophic.
If you spot a crisis right away, you should solve the problem before it gets bigger and bigger, due to a lot of comments from unsatisfied clients which might gather up.
Your time of reacting is really important when it comes to social media since news travel fast and bad news travel faster.
Gather actionable insights
When clients state their negative comments, it is the perfect time for you to make up a list and offer them actionable insights and solutions to their problems.
First, you need to brainstorm with your team to find out what is the source of your customers’ problems and what can you do to solve them efficiently.
When gathering queries, you might notice certain patterns. The key is to learn how to break the patterns and implement solutions.
Develop a campaign performance analysis
A brand sentiment analysis is essential especially when you want to assess your current or previous campaign, looking at metrics.
When developing a campaign performance analysis, you will also find posts related to your brand, where people have not tagged you, but talked about you.
It is crucial to learn what they think about your new campaign and even offer them an answer or comment, depending on their query.
Since you want your campaign’s results to be skyrocketing, it’s clear that you have to work on maintaining a healthy relationship with your clients.
They are the ones who decide your faith. However, it is still important to impose your presence and let your brand’s values reflect into your work.
Find opportunities to improve
By receiving feedback and reviews, you can find new ways to constantly improve in order to increase lead generation.
Better products and services will call for better-understanding and friendly clients who believe in your connection.
Improve customer service
If customers complain about your brand’s late responses, it is time to reevaluate customer service.
Maybe you need a change of strategy when it comes to your team, or even a restructuring of the team.
Customer service lies at the foundation of your customers’ happiness, right after the quality of your products, of course.
Therefore, consider being prompt when answering their queries, always on-point and friendly, no matter how big their problem is.
Remember that you are in control since you are the one who can find a solution that can make them change their opinion about your brand.
Run a competitive analysis
Besides looking at what people say about your brand, you can also see what customers say about your competitors.
This way, if they complain about your competition’s products or services, that is the perfect moment for you to step in and offer your solution.
You might see it as stealing clients, but in our world this is called marketing. If you are better than your competitors, let people know it and prove them with your products.
If you notice that your competitors have a better marketing strategy than yours, then maybe you can use this competitive analysis to learn more from them.
2. How to perform a brand sentiment analysis
Starting from scratch can give you headaches. However, this is the only way to do it if you want to make your brand succeed on its own.
Here are the steps you need to take to perform a brand sentiment analysis that could help you change your game and your audience’s opinion about you.
Find out on which social media platforms people talk about your brand
Firstly, when you start analyzing brand sentiment, you have to find out on which social media platforms people talk about you more.
This way, you will know where to focus your attention more and where to adjust your marketing strategy.
Maybe on Instagram you get a lot of hearts and you are everyone’s darling, but on Twitter people are not so happy about your services.
Think about maintaining a balance. You need to offer everyone a top-notch experience when they interact with your brand.
Otherwise, they will rate you as biased, as if you prefer your Instagram customers instead of your Twitter customers.
Treat everyone with the same importance to receive exactly what you wish for.
Put mentions into context
Sometimes running a sentiment analysis can be tricky since a tool relying on AI cannot detect sarcasm.
Clients may say that you’re killing it with your services, on a very positive note, but due to the unfortunate choice of words, “kill” can be identified as part of a negative feedback.
It is best to put all the mentions into context to be able to respond accordingly, without misinterpreting clients’ reactions.
If you are feeling creative, you can answer with the same sarcasm, as long as you don’t start a war. Remember that your goal is to solve their query, no matter how they issued their problem.
Use a sentiment analysis tool
Performing a sentiment analysis without using a tool is like finding a Cinderella by only knowing her show size.
Not impossible, but extremely tiring and time-consuming. That is why using a brand sentiment tool will save you a lot of trouble.
Luckily, there are numerous sentiment analysis tools that can help you learn a lot about the latest trends in your industry and niche, competitors’ analysis and, more important, people’s feedback about your brand.
3. 6 types of brand sentiment analysis
When trying to categorize brand sentiment analysis, depending on the type of feedback, you should know that it can be positive, neutral and negative.
An important thing to keep in mind when analyzing social media sentiment is that a monitoring tool cannot detect sarcasm.
Therefore, you will need to closely analyze the results to learn exactly whether you might need to change the category for some of your feedback.
If sarcasm or irony is included, then those mentions that seem negative for your tool’s bot might actually be positive, and vice versa.
Also you should check the neutral mentions and see exactly what your customers think about your brand.
If you act in time, maybe you prevent those neutral mentions to turn into negative ones.
Next, depending on the way you perform your brand sentiment analysis, it can be automatic, manual or effective.
Manual sentiment analysis means developing a manual search to find out what people say about your brand.
This is not very effective since it takes ages to manually search for people’s feedback and reviews and then develop a report based on the results.
An automatic sentiment analysis means using a brand sentiment analysis tool to perform a thorough evaluation of your brand’s mentions.
And lastly, the effective brand sentiment analysis is a mix of both manual and automatic sentiment analysis.
You need to manually go through your neutral reviews and feedback, spot irony and sarcasm and then categorize those mentions again.
4. What can affect sentiment analysis’ accuracy
When it comes to the accuracy of your sentiment analysis, you should know that sarcasm and irony could affect the understanding, and also the lack of context plays a big part here.
Sarcasm and irony
There is finally a feature that cannot be detected by AI (at least not yet) which implies the help of a human being.
For the bot behind your social media sentiment analysis, it is hard to depict ironical comments and sarcasm in your clients’ feedback.
When someone says “Love the fact that I received a squished sandwich when ordering X’s food”, for you it’s clear that they don’t actually love their experience.
However, the AI behind the tool might categorize this as positive sentiment. That is why you have to scroll through all neutral sentiment analysis posts to spot the sarcasm.
Lack of context
Another factor that could affect the accuracy of your brand sentiment analysis is the lack of context.
If the bot from your monitoring tool takes some words out of context, it wrongly might interpret the message.
And here is where you step in again to closely look at the context of the reviews and feedback when necessary.
5. Sentiment analysis' advantages
Some marketers tend to leave brand sentiment analysis last when they develop a new marketing campaign.
However, this part is as important as setting your goals. Without brand sentiment, you cannot know what people think about you.
Let’s see which are the advantages of sentiment analysis.
Scalability
The great part about using a listening or monitoring tool to measure brand sentiment is that it is all automatic.
You do not need to go through all the tweets, comments or reviews you get on all social media platforms.
It is more cost-effective to use automated sentiment analysis for the benefit of your brand’s strategy.
Accuracy
For the accuracy of your sentiment analysis, you will need both human help and sentiment analysis tool.
This way, you will get a faster result and when you go through the neutral posts, you will be able to spot sarcasm and irony.
You will be a lot faster and you will have an objective view of things due to the bot behind your tool.
Automatization
By using a sentiment analysis tool, you will find out about your clients’ feedback and reviews in a blink of an eye. The automatic system will save you a lot of resources.
Real-time analysis
A brand sentiment analysis tool can offer you a real-time evaluation that can contribute to the development of a new marketing strategy, based on the reviews you get.
Your game will change as you go, at a faster pace, having the chance to adapt really quickly, depending on what the sentiment analysis shows you.
The fact that it’s a real-time analysis helps you look at the negative sentiment and quickly solve your customer issues before degenerating into bigger problems.
6. 15 best brand sentiment analysis tools
Since we have mumbled and rumbled about the use of social media sentiment analysis tools, we have put together a list of the best sentiment analysis tools.
1. Hubspot
Hubspot is one of the most useful monitoring tools with qualitative survey responses that can help you find out what your customers think about your brand right away.
2. Critical Mention
Critical Mention looks at publications and news that refer to your brand. That is how you will find out what people think about your business.
3. Repustate
Repustate provides an advanced text-analysis feature that offers a higher accuracy when looking at your clients’ reviews and feedback.
4. Lexalytics
Lexalytics is an effective brand sentiment analysis tool which explains why a client responds in a certain way when it comes to sharing their opinion about your brand.
5. MAXG
MAXG is part of Hubspot and it’s a feature which can analyze customers’ sentiment from your CRM.
6. Social Mention
Social Mention is a free sentiment analysis tool which is super easy to use. All you have to do is enter a keyword in the search bar and you will find out everything you need to know about negative and positive sentiment.
7. Brandwatch
Brandwatch provides a feature different from the rest of the tools, since it can analyze images that refer to your brand (like memes).
8. Sentiment Analyzer
Sentiment Analyzer is another free brand sentiment analysis app, but it works differently. You have to copy the text you want to analyze and the tool will offer you a sentiment score.
9. Awario
Awario searches for your brand’s mentions in all social media platforms to learn your customers’ opinion about your products and services.
10. Social Searcher
Social Searcher is very effective and easy to use. Just type in a keyword, name of brand, or industry topic and you will obtain a thorough sentiment analysis.
11. Rosette
Rosette is one of the best social media sentiment tools since it can analyze mentions and reviews in over 30 languages. Pretty cool, right?
12. Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics is a brand sentiment app that will also show you whatever is said about your brand and your competitors in the online world.
13. Qualtrics
Qualtrics helps you connect all your social media platforms and evaluates the content written about your brand.
14. Talkwalker
Talkwalker is another brand sentiment analysis tool which shows you how your customers feel about your services and products. The tool analyzes your comments, mentions and campaigns.
15. RapidMiner
RapidMiner provides feedback about your brand that will help you work on your marketing strategy to offer customers exactly what they expect.
Final Thoughts
Brand sentiment analysis is like a heart-shaped chocolate. The important thing is that, when you break it, it should not be hollow on the inside.
This heart-shaped chocolate (which is a metaphor for your brand) should be full of delicious cream (your customers’ positive sentiment). Are you craving for chocolate yet?
By using a sentiment analysis tool, it should be easier for you to find out what customers’ opinions about your brand are. Easier, but also cost and time-efficient.
We hope that this complete guide about brand sentiment analysis has already convinced you to start yours and learn how to manage all the eventual problems.
In case you have any questions, I’d be happy to help. We are only a few clicks away.
