According to a survey by UpCity, 38% of U.S. and Canadian businesses perform social listening in 2022. The participants who use social media listening aimed to attract new customers (17%), provide better customer service (16%), and better understand customer preferences (16%). A lot of thought has to be put before deciding which solution or tool would best suit your business strategy or objective. This article aims to cover all your questions on social listening and customer sentiment analysis and how they make an impact on brand building. If you have any questions after reading this article, please feel free to comment and we will get back to you on the same.
What is Customer Sentiment Analysis/Social Listening
As the name suggests, customer sentiment analysis is a method to derive how customers perceive your brand or product to better understand what your target market segment expects from you. It can also be used to innovate existing products and services or create new ones.
The million dollar idea is that user generated content such as customer reviews, blog articles, social media posts tend to be more informative and insightful than direct methods such as surveys and interviews.
Monthly users of some of the top social media apps globally in 2021:
Facebook – 2.89 billion
YouTube – 2.29 billion
Instagram – 1.39 billion
LinkedIn – 800 million
Twitter – 463 million
Pinterest – 454 million
[Source: Search Engine Journal]
From these, businesses have a larger, more diverse resource pool to understand what objections their customers face, evaluate their prevalence, and their relevance, before acting on the same.
It’s also important to note that sentiment analysis on social media or anywhere on the internet is restricted to brand mentions. You can include industry-specific keywords, competitor mentions, different product mentions, and other relevant terms that will enable you to match your key business objectives.
Benefits of Customer Sentiment Analysis
Customer sentiment analysis is a blessing for marketing teams who can gather valuable customer data to attract and retain their audience. It also allows the marketing team to create more relevant content.for their audience. With social listening, marketers are better equipped to understand the language of their audience to better connect with them through social media campaigns and activities. Apart from these, sentiment analysis also improves the short and long term product strategy, by gaining insights and analyzing their customer’s buying habits.
How is Customer Sentiment measured using Artificial Intelligence
Customer sentiment analysis uses a scoring methodology to monitor conversations and evaluates language and voice inflections to measure customer attitude, opinions and emotions about a brand or product. This is done by scanning across multiple platforms for brand mentions (primary) and certain other variables (eg. competitors, niche segments etc.). Artificial Intelligence simplifies this entire process of scanning and gathering such data in near-real time and provides highly accurate results. The branch of AI that is used for understanding and capturing human emotions is called Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). NLP provides computers to understand text and spoken words. In this case, NLP is used to segregate negative and positive comments.
Should you go for an existing Platform or a Customized Solution?
The answer depends on if the platform caters to your niche specifically or not. Most social listening platforms cater to a wide range of audience without taking into account industry-specific requirements. As a result, it might limit the analysis to certain objectives. The best course of action is to define a strategy and then look for products that are a close or perfect match to meet your needs. Otherwise, customized solutions do not take long to be built.
