It’s important to get people talking about your brand, but how they’re talking about it — or social media sentiment — is also crucial.
Are consumers giving off positive or negative vibes when they mention your brand?
Measuring your social media sentiment will help you determine this.
We’re laying out just how to do that in today’s post.
What Is Social Media Sentiment?
Sentiment is how people feel about something.
With social media, it’s used as a measurement to gauge positive or negative feelings and comments about your brand.
Furthermore, these positive and negative perceptions have one of the biggest impacts on consumers’ buying decisions.
And unfortunately, people are more likely to leave negative reviews.
As this report from Corra shows, these 26 reasons are the top areas that prompt customers to complain or lean towards a negative social media sentiment.
Notice that over 50% of consumers are likely to complain if there’s a service issue.
As for where consumers complain, social media is a top choice outside of in-person complaints.
[Source]
As a result, your social media channels are a no-brainer for mining sentiment.
55% of consumers call out brands on social to get a resolution or response. cc @SproutSocial Click To TweetWe’re Living In A Review Culture
Most of all, social media sentiment matters because 75% of consumers consider online reviews important.
Think about how many times you’ve scrolled through the reviews before making a purchase. I do it on the daily!
Reviews are a great place to grasp brand sentiment.
As a note, we strongly discourage our clients from deleting or ignoring negative reviews.
Instead, we help them create campaigns where we garner more positive social media sentiment and help tip the scales back in the right direction.
You too can easily do this through:
- Word of mouth
- Email marketing
- In-office or online contests for truthful feedback listed online
Learn to use negative reviews as an educational moment and you’ll start to get an idea of your social media sentiment, too.
Customer reviews are a great place to understand brand sentiment. Click To TweetHow You Can Measure Social Media Sentiment
I bet you’re wondering how we measure sentiment. Sorry, but it’s not done manually.
Trying to read into every single social mention, including reviews, is extremely time-consuming.
Sure, you could go through every comment and label it positive, neutral, or negative. But we feel this time could be better spent elsewhere.
I actually did this for my honors thesis and it took a CRAZY amount of time.
Feel free to steal my spreadsheet if you insist on DIY (which is linked in my bio here). 😉
Instead, you’ll need to look to machine learning to get your hands on social media sentiment data.
Unfortunately, measuring sentiment isn't an easy DIY task.Click To TweetTools For Social Media Sentiment
First of all, let’s start with free tools for measuring sentiment.
Free Sentiment Tools
Below is an example of what Determ returned when I searched “B Squared Media.”
Paid Sentiment Tools
Try these two free or two paid tools for measuring your social media sentiment.Click To TweetHow We Measure Sentiment
Finally, we use Sprout Social to measure social media sentiment for ourselves and our clients.
Their platform allows us to put social listening at the forefront of social media management with a few power reports.
Not only do they allow you to track engagements, they also show trending hashtags and sentiments.
AND, they have a nifty sentiment report based on your keywords that shows you at a glance how you’re doing.
Clients love our “pretty” reports from Sprout!
Most of all, the reports easily show a client how they’re doing at a glance. There’s no filtering through endless Excel sheets filled with raw data.
Are you currently measuring sentiment as a part of your social media strategy? I’d love to hear how! Just let me know in the comments section below.
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