Tracking and Analyzing Social Media Sentiment

Sentiment analysis is often referred to as opinion mining, and it is the analysis of the attitudes, emotions, and opinions behind a social media mention online. It’s a way to measure the tone of the conversation to determine if the person is generally happy, angry, or even annoyed.

By measuring mentions alone, you may be misled by what your mentions really mean because you’re only relying on the number of mentions and not the quality. You may think that a surge in mentions is a good thing particularly if you’ve just launched a new product or published new content as part of your social media marketing strategy. However, how certain are you that these mentions are positive ones and talk about your brand in the best light?

Analyzing sentiment will help you understand what the general feeling is on a particular subject relating to your brand thus giving you a more comprehensive picture of the social conversations that are relevant to you.

Measuring Sentiment

Metrics that reveal  how people found us and if they are engaging are through comments, likes, shares, re-tweets, inbound links and onsite engagement. The numerical metrics will only tell us how many mentions while the quality metrics like sentiments will include opinions, feelings, the quality of shares, comments, replies, ratings, re-tweets and conversations.

Sentiment Analysis Tools

Here are some practical tools for tracking and analyzing sentiment:

Google Alerts

Google Alerts are a simple way to monitor your search queries and is a good starting point for tracking influencers, trends, and competitors.

Hootsuite

With Hootsuite, users can easily filter mentions and sort by sentiment. Furthermore, they can also track sentiment by keywords and set up automated assignments by chosen keywords.

If you set up Twitter mentions on Hootsuite, you can scan for Tweets containing positive terms such as “amazing”, “thank you”, and “love.” Hootsuite Insights gives you an overview of sentiment and allows you to see the quality of your brand mentions.

Fedica

Fedica is an easy-to-use analytics platform with embedded engagement and publishing engine. Fedica has an Alert feature where you can define and set an alert on any topic, word, hashtags or a combination of. You can then monitor sentiments that you care about and in the context of your brand or product. You can also set the tweet alert so as you receive the results right into your Inbox.

Fedica also has a powerful Mention Map tool. It scans for any Twitter user mentioning your @handle and segments them by location, then displays all of them on a live map with a straightforward, interactive interface.

Knowing where your followers live is important, knowing where does any engaged audience come from is equally important and Fedica’s Mention Map allows you to do just that.

Twitter Advanced Search

Twitter Advanced Search is a free online tool that will help you find Tweets based on a sentiment analysis tool that allows you to enter your desired keyword and check the positive or negative box. Start with keywords that include your brand and product names and even their misspellings, and your CEO’s name.

Resolving the sentiment challenge is not an easy one, but there are some tools that go in the right direction. Remember that your chances of social media marketing success will be higher the more information you have on your audience and target market. You’ll want to keep a close ear and listen to what is being said about your brand to ensure that your reputation is a positive one. Sentiment analysis tools allow you to gain the insight you need to understand your consumer’s attitude towards your brand.