Tracking Your Audience’s Mood with Social Media Sentiment Analysis

How do your customers feel about your business right now? Owners and marketers often have at least a broad idea of how their target audience perceives a brand, yet keeping up with the changes in perception can prove difficult.

This is where social media sentiment analysis comes in. It’s a way to always stay updated on the conversations surrounding your brand and enable companies to make informed decisions in real-time.

And many social sentiment analysis tools can provide detailed reports in minutes. 

Check out a full breakdown of how social media sentiment analysis works and how to leverage it below.

Understanding Social Media Sentiment Analysis

Social media sentiment analysis is the process of analyzing the thoughts, opinions, emotions, and even attitudes surrounding a brand in social media content.

Think of it as having a sneak peek into what others are saying about you online, whether it’s your customers, competitors, or even your harshest critics.

Knowing this information can prove invaluable at all levels of your business decisions. It can enable your company to make informed decisions to improve brand reputation, achieve more conversions by calibrating marketing efforts to customer sentiments, and even spot market trends as they emerge.

Benefits of Social Media Sentiment Analysis

Tapping into sentiment analysis in social media yields several benefits:

1. Understanding Customer Preferences

Gathering social sentiment data helps brands understand what customers are thinking about their services, products, or overall brands.

Companies already have several ways to gather this information, such as through customer reviews, surveys, or monitoring the brand’s social media profiles. But through social sentiment analysis, you can discover what people are saying beyond the accounts or channels you control.

This can help paint the full picture of what your customers want, don’t want, hope for, and more.

2. Improving Marketing Strategies

Modern marketing efforts are only successful if companies can leverage data. Sentiment analysis on social networks provides your marketing team with unique information regarding the end consumer, which can help improve the results of your campaigns.

When you know what your customers want or are saying about you, it’s much easier to create highly targeted and compelling campaigns, as you can tap into the specific desires of your target audience.

3. Identifying Brand Sentiment

Brand sentiment refers to how people feel about a company. Knowing this information can enable brands to improve their image and reputation, as well as mitigate PR crises should they arise.

Social media sentiment analysis can also warn companies about a growing negative trend that could affect the brand’s reputation before it gains significant traction.

4. Gathering Essential Insights

At its core, social media sentiment analysis is a form of data collection, which in today’s landscape is crucial for all sectors.

These efforts enable companies to migrate to a data-driven approach and make better decisions across all business departments. They can create a new ecosystem that removes the guesswork.

Key Components of Social Media Sentiment Analysis

Gathering the data is only part of the process. Effective social media sentiment analysis must be interpreted to reveal key insights into the broader brand discussion from both written and visual content.

Successful social media sentiment analysis involves:

1. Sentiment classification: Determines whether the discourse is “positive”, “negative”, or “neutral”. Social media sentiment analysis tools do this automatically as the data is gathered;
2. Emotion detection: Reveals specific emotions in social media posts, such as anger, frustration, joy, or happiness. It goes deeper into the meaning of the content, not just the overall sentiment;
3. Topic extraction: Break down the data by topic, such as product quality, customer support services, and others. It helps companies understand which sentiment is attributed to what brand element.

Mandala AI’s Social Media Sentiment Analysis Tools: A Brief Overview

Collecting and classifying this data without social media sentiment analysis tools is virtually impossible. Brands now have several tools that tackle the process in minutes, such as Sprout Social or Monday.com.

Companies should understand the key features of each solution to determine which can provide the most relevant suite for their specific social sentiment tracking needs.

Here’s a brief overview of Mandala AI’s tools for social sentiment tracking and interpreting:

• Mandala Cosmos: A content engine to help track and brainstorm new content ideas.

• Ripples: A feed to allow easy post-monitoring.

• Mandala Analytics: An AI-integrated analytics tool to gather data from billions of brand mentions across the web.

• Top Channel Monitoring: Helps keep a closer eye on a specific channel most relevant to your brand.

• Time Analytics: Know when people talk about your brand.

• Keyword and Hashtag Analytics: Identify the terms and hashtags used to discuss your brand.

• Insights and Mentions: tap into unique data from your audience, no matter where they’re posting.

Sentiment Analysis in Social Networks

Sentiment analysis tools often track and interpret data from most of the major social media platforms, including:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. TikTok
4. Instagram
5. YouTube

Even if your company doesn’t have a profile on all these platforms, it’s still crucial to monitor them, as your target audience could be extremely active on them.

Brands can use the data collected from social media platforms to either improve how they communicate with their social following or even set up new accounts with a more data-driven strategy. These tools help you understand social sentiment, spot emerging trends on social media, and adequately prepare for them.

Real-Time Monitoring and Reporting

Assume you want to improve how your brand communicates on Instagram, but before you can do that, you need to gather information on your target audience.

You can send out a survey to your Instagram followers with an incentive to complete it, and then use that information to improve your strategy. The problem with this approach is the time it will take you to collect and interpret the data.

With an Instagram sentiment analysis tool, you can access real-time data whenever needed. Decision-making is therefore streamlined at all times, as is reputation management and even crisis response.

Sentiment Analysis for Brand Management

People want to interact with brands that match their morals, opinions, and key customer needs.

Through social analysis, you can improve your brand’s reputation to ensure you match the preferences and needs of the consumer. This applies both to your key products and services as well as other factors your target audience considers in the buyer’s decision, such as how environmentally friendly a company is.

Apart from improving brand perception, these sentiment analysis tools help you identify your current brand advocates, whether they’re influencers or regular consumers. These individuals can become part of a new approach to your marketing efforts and help disseminate your message to their networks.

Social media sentiment analysis is quickly becoming a priority for all brands, no matter their sector or even how active they are on social media themselves.

As consumers keep using these networks to express their interests and dislikes of brands, companies must know what’s being said about them, preferably in real-time and across all available networks.

Tools like Mandala AI streamline data collection, monitoring, and analysis efforts and provide companies with a simple solution to hear all the buzz.

To get started on a better way to make decisions and interact with your target audience, you can sign up for Mandala AI now for free or unlock our tools’ full potential through a subscription.