How to perform social media sentiment analysis

Social media sentiment analysis dives beneath the surface of the initial tally of likes, comments, and clicks to determine people's deeper feelings and attitudes about your brand. Sentiment analysis is a form of social listening that is performed with artificial intelligence (AI) or natural language processing (NLP) tools to track mentions of your brand in user-generated content such as tweets, posts, comments, and reviews. This data gives you insight into how people engage with your brand, as well as topics around your products or services.

Sentiments are typically categorized into three main classes: positive, neutral, and negative. Here is a breakdown of what those sentiments entail:

• Positive: Positive sentiment indicates a favorable or optimistic view, often expressing satisfaction, approval, or enthusiasm with your brand.

• Neutral: Neutral sentiment denotes a lack of strong emotion, presenting information objectively without a discernible positive or negative bias.

• Negative: Negative sentiment captures expressions of dissatisfaction, criticism, or discontent, reflecting a pessimistic viewpoint.

Sentiment analysis is critical because it gives insight into how consumers engage with your brand and its overall online reputation. Performing a sentiment analysis can better your relationship with your audience, help you monitor your brand’s reputation, and manage crises. These insights give your brand a competitive advantage, as you’re directly plugged into how consumers think about your product, including any potential improvements they might suggest. These insights can also help with performing brand audits, as you can assess on a deeper level what’s working and what’s not in terms of your content and overall brand presence. In this section, we’ll expand further on these benefits.

One of the most important insights to glean from your social media sentiment analysis is understanding your audience and their engagement with your brand and its content. Customer feedback is a gift, as your brand can use this feedback to improve its overall messaging and content strategy to align with audience desires more closely. By considering this feedback and adjusting accordingly, your brand demonstrates responsiveness to customer needs and builds stronger relationships with your base.

Another particularly strong use case for social media sentiment analysis is using this tool to monitor your brand and manage its reputation. If your brand has lots of mentions on a given platform, that doesn’t always mean the engagement is positive. By proactively monitoring these mentions and interactions, your brand can address any negative feedback as it occurs. Negative word of mouth can be extremely damaging for brands, so it’s important to be alert to negative customer reviews or posts to remedy the situation for your customers and contribute to a positive brand reputation. You can use sentiment analysis to identify positive comments about your brand and respond to the customer to make the interaction even better and improve brand loyalty.

While crisis management is hopefully something that your brand won’t have to deal with too frequently, social media sentiment analysis can be a helpful tool in your crisis management strategy. A sentiment analysis can help your brand gauge the public’s response and take action to address their concerns. Your brand’s responsiveness and transparency in times of crisis can contribute to a positive public perception.

Having data on the attitudes and feelings of your audience provides a huge competitive advantage, as it can help your brand improve its messaging, products, and overall customer engagement strategy. It can also alert your brand to current trends to participate in, as one viral meme or witty response can elevate the profile of your brand online as one that’s in tune, relatable, and knowledgeable on current topics. You can also leverage this data to identify opportunities — like what customers are saying about your competitors — and use those insights to capitalize on their shortcomings or to replicate their successes.

Now that we’ve covered the basics and benefits of performing a social media sentiment analysis, we’ll explore how to conduct one.

The initial phase of performing social media sentiment analysis involves vigilant monitoring of your brand’s social media mentions. Social listening tools play a pivotal role in this process, allowing businesses to collect and monitor vast amounts of data in real-time. These tools employ advanced algorithms to sift through the continuous stream of social media content, identifying and extracting relevant mentions.

By automatically scanning platforms such as Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, and more, social listening tools compile a comprehensive dataset of user-generated content for your review. With a wealth of user comments and feedback about your brand, you can then analyze it for a deeper understanding of customer sentiment.

Some advanced solutions like the Khoros Social Media Management Solution not only monitor brand mentions but also offer automated sentiment analysis to provide your brand with actionable insights without the need for manual review. This can be beneficial for enterprise brands with thousands or millions of daily mentions and will help you prioritize responses so you can respond to urgent comments in real time.

Step two in this process requires analysis. Now that you’ve gathered the data, it’s time to determine what it means. A key step in this process is categorizing the sentiments you’ve gleaned into the positive, neutral, and negative buckets we’ve outlined below. Here are a few examples of common words you’ll find in reviews and posts and how they could be sorted into these sentiments:

• Positive: love, great, amazing, best, happy

• Neutral: okay, adequate, fine

• Negative: hate, dislike, worst, horrible, unhappy

Exporting user comments and posts into a spreadsheet and using text filters to label each is a method of manually analyzing sentiment. However, you won’t be getting a complete view because this option won’t account for sentiment expressed through images, video, or even emojis which are commonplace on social media. To analyze visual content, you’ll need to use more advanced tools or manually review and label each mention.

Once mentions are gathered and analyzed, the final step in social media sentiment analysis involves calculating the social sentiment score. This score provides a quantitative measure of the overall sentiment expressed in the collected data. As you’re evaluating social sentiment scores, one of the key considerations you should have is monitoring changes in sentiment over time. Sudden shifts in sentiment can indicate emerging issues, public relations crises, or changing trends.

With that being said, there are two primary ways the social sentiment score is typically calculated:

1. Positive mentions as a percentage of total mentions: This method will indicate the percentage of positive user mentions relative to the total. For example, if you received 250 positive mentions in a month and there were 1,000 total mentions in that time, your social sentiment score using this score would be 25% indicating that a quarter of your social media mentions are positive.

2. Positive mentions as a percentage of mentions that include sentiment: This method will indicate the percentage of positive user mentions compared to the total number of mentions where sentiment is expressed, so neutral mentions are excluded. For example, if you received 250 positive mentions, 100 negative mentions, and 650 mentions with neutral sentiment — your social sentiment score using this method would be 71.4% because 250/(250+100)=0.714. The neutral mentions are excluded to help filter out mentions where users aren’t expressing sentiment about your brand, such as asking a question about your products and services.

The second of these methods will always be higher than the first, but it’s valuable to look at scores using each method to understand sentiment around your brand at different levels. Tracking these scores over time can help your brand assess its effectiveness on various campaigns and strategies. The social sentiment score also finds application in broader social media reports and brand audits as a succinct metric for assessing the overall sentiment climate surrounding your brand. This can help you make informed decisions about reputation management, customer engagement, and strategic planning.

If you’ve run your brand’s social media sentiment analysis and are less than thrilled with the results, try these tips below to improve your brand’s social media standing.

One of the best ways to show that your brand is responsive and foster trust with your audience is to reply to requests, questions, and concerns in a timely manner—including the negative ones. This is especially true with social media customer service requests, as customers these days demand quick and efficient responses. Not only will responding to both positive and negative reviews demonstrate your brand’s approachability and responsiveness, it can help boost your engagement as well.

Spotify, for example, maintains its own customer support page on Twitter/X to help customers get quick questions and issues resolved. In the example below, Spotify responded to this customer question in just six minutes.

Actually listening to what’s being said and then taking action can improve the customer experience, and your brand’s overall social media sentiment. Customer feedback acts as a direct channel to understand and address the concerns, preferences, and expectations of your brand’s audience. By actively incorporating feedback into business strategies, brands demonstrate a commitment to customer satisfaction and signal a responsiveness to consumer needs. Positive changes inspired by customer input can result in an immediate boost in sentiment, fostering a sense of trust and loyalty among the audience.

This example from Whole Foods is a great example of this, as a customer mentions being disappointed that the grocery chain no longer stocks their favorite trash bag. Whole Foods responded by notifying the customer that they could speak to their local store about bringing it back, and also followed up by asking where they shop which suggests the company may act on this further themselves.

In the crowded marketplace of the internet, customers appreciate a tailored approach that acknowledges their individuality. Thanks to the data you’ve gathered from your sentiment analysis, you can personalize your brand’s interactions with customers to give them the responses they’re seeking in the face of an issue with your brand.

A personalized response might acknowledge your customer's concerns, address them by name, and express genuine regret for the inconvenience caused. Your brand could then offer a personalized solution, such as a replacement, a discount on the next purchase, or providing additional information to resolve the problem. The customer may update their feedback or express gratitude for the brand's responsiveness, turning a potentially negative situation into a positive one.

In the below example from Southwest Airlines, the company responded to a customer’s positive mention with a personalized reply that’s far more meaningful than a templated “Thank you” response.

Understanding what people think about your brand is a game-changer, and a social media sentiment analysis can yield unparalleled insights into the collective perception of your brand’s products or services. By analyzing online conversations, your brand can identify trends, sentiments, and recurring themes to gain a comprehensive understanding of customer attitudes and preferences. Positive sentiments highlight strengths that can be emphasized in your marketing strategies, while negative sentiments offer opportunities for improvement and course correction.

The sheer volume and diversity of online conversations make manual sentiment analysis a difficult and ever-growing task, as millions of posts and comments are uploaded every day. Social media management tools are a necessity to keep up with the constantly changing world of social media and its impact on your brand. The Khoros Social Media Management solution empowers your brand to navigate the vast expanse of social media with precision by automating these analyses to identify trends, address concerns, and strategically align brand messaging with public sentiment. Request a demo today and discover how sentiment analysis can elevate your brand’s social media strategy to new heights.