Sentiment Analysis: What Is It and Why It’s So Important

Not many business owners can accurately explain how the public feel about their brand and its offering. While some would argue they’re into brand reputation management, you probably only understand your customers and their feedback on a surface level without sentiment analysis.

But what is sentiment analysis? And is it fundamental for better brand and reputation management?

What Is Sentiment Analysis?

Sentiment analysis is the process of interpreting the emotional undertone behind a string of words. It’s a type of natural language process (NLP) technique to understand the context of a particular message, considering tone, intent and emotion.

In brand and reputation management, sentiment analysis provides businesses with an accurate analysis of online conversations around their brand name. For instance, sentiment analysis on social media makes way for informed and better marketing campaigns.

What Are Natural Language Processing Techniques?

Natural language processing is an artificial intelligence-driven process of enabling computers with the capacity to comprehend written and spoken language in a manner similar to that of humans. Aside from sentiment analysis, there are other natural language processing techniques, such as the following:

• Speech recognition or speech-to-text
• Part of speech tagging or grammatical tagging
• Word sense disambiguation
• Named entity recognition (REM)
• Coreference resolution
• Natural language detection

But to focus on our topic, let’s look into why businesses should incorporate sentiment analysis techniques in their reputation and brand management initiative.

The Importance of Sentiment Analysis in Brand Reputation Management

In reputation and brand management, it’s common practice to focus on the numbers and where the brand conversations are taking place. And while such practice can give you decent insights, such as the number of reviews, numbers alone are not enough to understand how your brand and its offerings are faring across the market. Sentiment analysis allows you to differentiate customer feedback such as:

• “I miss Chick-fil-A so bad.”
• “I just had Chick-fil-A, and it was bad.”

Without a natural language processing technique, most brand reputation monitoring software would tag both feedback as negative due to the keyword “bad.” Simply, sentiment analysis grants you what the numbers lack: context. And with employing the valuable insights you get from sentiment analysis, you can expect to:

• Run better marketing campaigns. For instance, sentiment analysis on social media can give you a better awareness and direction on which content works best. Thus, you can inform your strategy to get better results and responses from your target audience.
• Improve customer experience. With sentiment analysis using product review data, you accurately put a pulse on what your customers are raving about or complaining about your product. The data from such analysis enables you to improve customer experience and satisfaction.

Tips and Tools for Sentiment Analysis Techniques

For this section on sentiment analysis techniques, let’s look into social media and product reviews. Apart from tips, if you’re looking for sentiment analysis tools, we’ll also name some here.

Sentiment Analysis on Social Media

For good reasons, many social media marketers are fixated on metrics. But while every click counts on social media, emotions significantly contribute to purchase decisions. Competitive brands employ sentiment analysis to convert mentions on social media into actionable business data.

Here are some tips to get you started on sentiment analysis on social media:

1. Determine your top social platforms. Not all social media platforms would be applicable to your business, so find out where you can connect with your target market. Apart from social media, you should consider other busy websites such as Google, Yelp, Glassdoor and Reddit for more comprehensive insights.
2. Track your mentions. In the search and hashtag features of social media platforms, you can search for your brand name and other relevant search terms, such as your products or services. You can also search for the names of key personnel of your company if your brand image is closely linked to its employees.
3. Analyze the sentiments. Consider the keywords people use to describe your brand, positively or negatively. Other terminology will probably be unique to your brand, product, or sector. So before analyzing, create a list of positive and negative words, then search through your mentions for posts containing these terms.

Sentiment Analysis Using Product Review Data

Unlike social media sentiment analysis, where you can work with brand mentions alone, product review sentiment analysis is more targeted. Product managers require insights to create a solid product plan. Instead of giving customers what you think they need, give them what they’re actually asking for. 

Here are some tips to help you go about sentiment analysis using product review data:

1. Collect online product reviews. In case you have little or no product reviews to work on, start by collecting feedback from your customers. You can ask through social media and include the link where they can leave a review. If you have a mailing list, you can also ask through email, offering a little incentive with the request.
2. Gather your data. Start with your own channels, such as your website and social media pages. But product reviews are scattered all over the internet, so manual scraping is probably not the best idea. Online product reviews are commonly found on Google Play, Amazon, Capterra, Reddit or G2.com, to name a few.

To touch on how beneficial product review analysis is, let’s look at the case of Paramount (formerly ViacomCBS). The multinational media powerhouse partnered with Rize Reviews to analyze how its products are fairing with its U.K. market. Our brand reputation management officers examined 4,000 product data gathered from 20 review websites. With our expertise and sentiment analysis tools, we then customized an intuitive dashboard for Paramount.

With the custom dashboard, our client has access to organized data, considering brand, manufacturer, retailer and product. As a result, our client’s management team was able to discuss possible business prospects to improve customer experience, particularly for its U.K. market.

To gain results like our client, you must fuse expertise and sentiment analysis tools in your brand reputation management strategy. But what sentiment analysis tools can you use?

Tools for Sentiment Analysis

Brand and reputation management is not an easy undertaking but definitely worthwhile as it’s critical to fostering consumer trust and loyalty. So here are some tools for sentiment analysis you can explore to aid your brand reputation monitoring. 

• Sprout Social
• Hootsuite
• Talkwalker
• Rize Reviews

Apart from being the most affordable, Rize Reviews is where you have a guarantee that you won’t be left at a loss. Rize Reviews specialists offer full-service online reputation management services.

Rize Reviews’ Online Reputation Management Services: Outperform Your Competitors With Better Marketing Campaigns

To recap: Sentiment analysis is key to understanding the context behind the mentions of your brand that can then inform your strategies, from marketing campaigns to customer experience and product development.

Our team at Rize Reviews has been helping businesses across different industries gauge how their respective markets respond to their offerings. If you’re facing a reputational crisis, our team also provides brand reputation repair services wherein we not only help you recover from brand damage but also shield you from future risks.

Rize Reviews also provides white-label services for businesses looking for white-label brand management solutions to cater to their clients or widen their services.

See our team and software in action with a free demo.