Marketers are rightfully obsessed with metrics. With markets increasingly competitive and globalized, staying on top of data is essential for understanding overall business performance and making informed decisions.
However, it's important to remember that your customers are more than just data points. How they feel about you and your brand is an important factor in purchasing decisions, and analyzing this chatter can give you critical business insights. Yet, it's easy to overlook audience emotions when you're deep-diving into metrics because they're difficult to quantify.
AI-powered sentiment analysis can help with this.
Social media sentiment analysis is a powerful method savvy brands use to translate social media behavior into actionable business data. This, in turn, helps them make informed decisions to evolve continuously and stay competitive.
In this guide, we’ll break down the importance of social media sentiment analysis, how to conduct it and what it can do to transform your business.
What is social media sentiment analysis?
Social media sentiment analysis is the process of gathering and understanding customers' perceptions of a product, service or brand. The analysis uses advanced algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) to evaluate the emotions behind social media interactions.
Research shows 70% of customer purchase decisions are based on emotional factors and only 30% on rational factors. By analyzing likes, comments, shares and mentions, brands can gain valuable insights into the emotional drivers that influence purchase decisions as well as brand loyalty. This helps tailor marketing strategies, improve customer service and make better business decisions.
In other words, social media sentiment analysis gives you a background for your customers' conversations and shows if your brand is getting good or bad attention. And if so, why?
Think of sentiment analysis as a subset of social listening. While businesses should obviously monitor their mentions, sentiment analysis digs into the positive, negative and neutral emotions surrounding those mentions.
In the video below, hear examples of how you can use sentiment analysis to fuel business decisions and how to perform it.
