What do people think about your brand right now? This question may seem simple. It can seem simple, but it can be crucial for marketers. This question should inform all aspects of your content and marketing strategies.

Brands can track online conversations about them and their competitors using social media sentiment analysis. They also gain quantitative insights into how they are perceived by others.

Social media sentiment analysis allows you to determine how each brand choice affects brand loyalty, customer perception, and brand image.

It might sound complicated. It may sound complicated. However, there are many tools that can help you collect and analyze the social data necessary to understand where your brand stands.

Bonus Download a free social media sentiment template and track audience sentiment over time.

What is social media sentiment analysis?

Social media sentiment analysis is the collection and analysis of information about how people talk about your brand via social media. Sentiment analysis goes beyond a simple count of comments or mentions. It considers emotions as well as opinions.

Social media sentiment analysis can sometimes be called “opinion mining” because it involves digging into the words and contexts of social posts to understand their opinions.

Social sentiment measurement is an important part any social media monitoring plan.

How to conduct a social media sentiment analysis in just 3 steps

We will be discussing some powerful tools that can help you make social sentiment analysis more efficient, easier, and better.

You can do some additional research if you aren’t ready to invest in social media sentiment analysis tools.

1. Keep an eye on your mentions

Social media sentiment analysis begins with identifying the conversations people have about your brand online. The problem is that they may not always tag you in these conversations.

Hootsuite streams can be set up to monitor all mentions of your brand on social media, even if you are not tagged. Here’s how you can collect them all in one spot.

Add a stream to each of your social accounts to the Hootsuite dashboard. This will track mentions of your accounts being tagged on social media.

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To make it easier to see all your Mentions streams at once, you might organize them into a Social Mentions board.

You can track posts on some social media platforms that you are not tagged with:

  • You can track hashtags that are related to your brand or products on Instagram.
  • You can use keywords or hashtags for Twitter.

Make sure you create streams for your brand and product names.

A board can also be a useful way to organize all these streams on one screen.

Check out our full post about social listening tools for more information on how to set up your mention tracking.

2. Analyze the sentiment of your mentions

Next, you will search for terms that convey sentiment in your mentions. Consider the types of words people might use when talking about your brand. Examples might include:

  • Positive: love, amazing, great, best, perfect
  • Negative: Bad, awful, terrible or the worst, hate

Other terms that are specific to your product, brand or industry will be likely. Make a list with positive and negative words, and then scan your mentions to find posts that include these terms.

You can set Hootsuite to automatically do some of the work for Twitter. To indicate positive sentiment, create a search stream in the dashboard using your name plus:). To indicate negative sentiment, create a search stream with your name and 🙁

You need to be aware of the context when you track sentiment manually. Is it sarcastic to say that they had the best customer experience with your brand?

3. Calculate your social sentiment score

There are two ways to calculate your social sentiment score:

  • Positive mentions as a proportion of total mentions
  • Positive mentions are a percentage of mentions that contain sentiment (removing neutral mentions).

It doesn’t matter what method you use, so long as you are consistent. Change is the most important thing to be aware of.

The second method will always give you a higher score.

Five of the most powerful social media sentiment analysis tools

Hootsuite, as we have already stated, is a powerful tool to collect the data you need to perform sentiment analysis. These tools go one step further and provide that analysis for you.

1. Brandwatch Powered Hootsuite insights

Hootsuite Insights powered By Brandwatch allows for detailed Boolean search strings that can be used to automatically monitor social sentiment. Word clouds will show you the most popular words that are used to talk about your brand. Charts that compare your social sentiment to your competitors will also be available.

Hootsuite Insights not only tracks positive and negative sentiment but also tracks specific emotions over time, such as anger and joy. This allows you to spot trends and sudden changes. You can filter sentiment by demographics or location to see how sentiment differs across your audience. You can also use the AI analysis option to identify the causes of significant sentiment changes.

Alerts are another useful feature that allows you to be notified when there is a sudden change of sentiment. This allows you to get ahead of any problems before they escalate.

2. Metionlytics

Mentionlytics’ pitch is “Discover all that is being said about you, your competitors, or any keyword.”

You can expand the scope of your search to view what people are saying about you brand all over the web. The built-in sentiment analysis function works in multiple languages.

3. Digimind

Digimind analyzes all relevant conversations about your brand, competitors, and other topics.

It pulls information form more than 850,000,000 web sources. This ensures that you get a complete view of sentiment towards your brand.

You can also analyze mentions, and apply filters to personalize your sentiment analysis process.

4. Crowd Analyzer

Crowd Analyzer, an Arabic-language social listening tool and sentiment analysis tool, is Crowd Analyzer. This is particularly important for brands targeting an Arabic-speaking audience. Other social sentiment tools don’t generally have the ability to recognize Arabic sentiment.

Source: Hootsuite App Directory

5. TalkWalker

TalkWalker collects information from over 150 million sources. The tool then uses artificial Intelligence to analyze sentiment, tone and emotions.

Bonus: Get a free social media sentiment report template

Our social media sentiment report template will help you create an impactful report that you can share with your team.

Click the File tab and then click Make a Copy to use the template. This will give you your own copy to use whenever you create a new social sentiment report.

Bonus Download a free social media sentiment template and track audience sentiment over time.

Three ways to increase brand sentiment on social media

It is not difficult to see the benefits of monitoring social media sentiment. Tracking social sentiment can help you understand your audience better, which in turn will help you improve social sentiment.

These strategies may sound familiar if you pay attention to the benefits section.

  1. Get to know your audience. When you get to know your audience, you can create messaging that resonates with them. It boils down to this: Give more of what your audience wants and less of the things they don’t.
  2. EngageRespond comments, mentions and direct messages. Maximize positive interactions and quickly resolve any negative mentions.
  3. Use social sentiment to find out what your audience thinks of your brand. While you focus on the weak areas, make sure to highlight your strengths. While you work to improve the lagging areas, be sure to keep your brand identity true.

Why is social media sentiment analysis so important

A simple count of social mentions will only tell you how many people are talking online about your brand. But what are they saying about your brand? This question can be answered by social media sentiment analysis.

A high number of mentions may look great at first glance. It might not look so great if there are a lot of negative posts.

BMW’s social mentions jumped in July — but the engagement was not good. There was confusion about a plan to sell subscription services for in car functions. The tweet that set the scene got almost 30,000 retweets, and 225,000 likes.

They could have believed they had done something right if they had been counting mentions.

However, the sentiment behind this increase in activity was primarily negative. BMW had to clarify its subscription plans.

Here are some reasons why your brand should track social sentiment.

1. Understand your audience

Marketers are most successful when they get to know their audience. This means that you must understand your audience’s feelings about your brand, social posts, and campaigns. Not just how often they mention you.

White Castle, for example, used social listening and sentiment analysis in order to find that customers associate White Castle sliders with the specific experience of eating them while they watch TV in bed.

White Castle used this knowledge to feature a couple who ate sliders in bed in its next campaign.

SourceWhite Castle ad via eMarketer Industry Voices

You can also monitor social media sentiment and alert you immediately if customer preferences or desires change.

2. Customer service can be improved

Two major benefits of monitoring sentiment are for customer service or support:

  1. It can alert your teams about any new or emerging problems. You might even find out about problems with a particular product or product. This will allow you to prepare your team or create social content that addresses the issue directly.
  2. People who are having a difficult experience with your brand can be reached out to you proactively. It is possible to resolve customer issues by simply responding or following up.

Adobe’s Twitter customer service team was able, despite not being tagged, to resolve the issue and make the customer happy.

3. Tweak brand messaging, product development

You can find out what your audience wants by following trends and looking for spikes in negative, neutral, or positive sentiment. This will help you decide what type of message you should post on each social media network.

You might even be able to gain insights that will impact your overall brand strategy or product development.

Zoom, for example, monitored their social sentiment to find the most negative myths about their product. They created a series TikTok videos to dispel those myths and increase customer confidence.

@zoom

Only facts. #zoom #fyp #facts

Original sound – Zoom

They also created a series called “Pro Tips” videos that answer the most frequently asked questions on social media. This reduced the workload for customer service and highlighted new features. Some of the new features were even inspired by social listening and analysis.

@zoom

Answer @im_siowei – Giving people what they want @Matt Head #zoom#focusmode #zoommeeting @fyp #december

Original sound – Zoom

4. Know where you stand in your niche

Brands can’t be everything to everyone. Social sentiment can help you see where you stand in your niche. This can help you reach the right people with the right messages at just the right time.

The production team at media company Underknown created a YouTube channel called “According to Science” and shared stories that were based on scientific research. The channel didn’t grow after 60 videos.

The team discovered that survival videos received the highest response after analyzing their data. They reworked their strategy and launched “How to Survive” a new channel. It gained over a million subscribers in just 18 months.

They created short videos on TikTok that regularly receive more than a million hits and received positive responses from Americans 18-34 years old.

@howtosurvive.show

Let’s see if this video remains up #SurvivalSkills#DoNotAttempt #educationalpurposes#FloridaMan #Crocodile

Original sound – How To Survive

An analysis of social media sentiment can help you identify the areas in which your business excels and where you may need to make improvements.

5. Spot brand crises can be identified early

Your brand should never be in crisis. Monitoring social sentiment can help you spot problems early, even if they do occur. You can either minimize negative sentiment or completely avoid it by implementing your crisis response plan.

In the BMW example, it took BMW 48 hours to respond to the heated seat controversy on Twitter and another day for an official statement to be posted on its website. BMW was unable to reverse the damage caused by the issue’s media attention. They might have been able correct the narrative if they had responded within the day.

Set up automatic alerts to alert you when sentiment or mentions spike. This is a great way to manage brand crises.


Hootsuite allows you to track social media sentiment and manage all your profiles from one dashboard. Schedule posts, respond and measure performance.

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The post Social Media Sentiment Analysing: Tools and Tips For 2022 appeared first at Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard.

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