Why you need to be gauging public sentiment

 Sentiment plays a significant role in how businesses shape and impact the success of their PR and marketing. 

But it shouldn’t just be seen as a PR tool. For a business, having deep knowledge of public sentiment around its audiences can be truly transformative – and when done well, can offer an unbelievable level of insight into your customer base.

But there are challenges in gauging public sentiment, particularly with the advent of increasingly powerful AI tools. 

Here we break down just what public sentiment is and how you can track and monitor it to use its findings to benefit your business. 

 

 What is sentiment analysis? 

 

Gaining successful insight into public sentiment, or opinion mining as it is sometimes called, can transform a business. It is often under-utilised as an information-gathering tactic because it can be difficult to master.

There was once a time where sentiment analysis was all but exclusive to political campaigning; when armies of clipboard-wielding data gatherers would descend on high streets, or hit the phones armed with national yellow pages. All to gain new insights into how the public perceives their candidate.

Today, the means of opinion mining are much more widespread. Modern sentiment analysis is similar to its political cousin, only in the sense that people still use it to uncover insight into external perceptions. But where it differs now, is huge.

When it comes to today’s public sentiment, you don’t need to gather textual data by issuing customer feedback surveys that no one fills in, or by conducting market research via a team of clipboard-wielding marketers. Your customers and potential customers are already telling you how they feel via social media, online reviews and by commenting on news articles about your company: they have touchpoints with your brand. Everywhere.

 

The difficulties of sentiment analysis 

 

People often run into issues with sentiment analysis when it comes to the combined challenges of time and money.

Effective sentiment analysis takes time;it takes investment. But it can reward your business well in the long-term – as long as you don’t fall into the trap of thinking there are quick-win machine-learning tools out there that can shortcut your time and financial investment.  .

Things like aspect-based sentiment analysis – ASBA – will implement a sentiment score to your content and responses. Analysis algorithms do exist, and using natural language processing will allocate positive, negative and neutral tags based on its perceived understanding of words.

But something these things all fail to understand, Is context.

 

The case for actual people

 

Ai driven NLP tools can certainly aggregate feedback much quicker than it can be done manually. But if you want to do sentiment analysis correctly, you need people.  

Sometimes this might mean you need a lot of people. But where good old-fashioned humans fair outstrip the AI machine, is in picking up on tone and context. 

Lets say an airline cancels a flight. It uses social media pages to announce said cancellation. 1000 comments are posted underneath. 370 people all respond in the same way. GREAT! That’s all they say, GREAT!

 An NLP system, thinks it is much smarter than it actually is. It sees the word GREAT and thinks, great. That’s a nice positive word. So, for everyone who has commented this, I declare their response to be a positive one.

But we all know that isn’t the case. If you were to look at this at a glance, NLP would have you believe that 37% of your respondents were happy about their current situation. 

That can be a somewhat dangerous situation to be in. Because if you take that data at face value, you’ll be fooling yourself into believing that your audiences are happier than they actually are. 

For a business leader, who isn’t really at the coal face of public engagement, they could see these outcomes in pure statistical form. This can fool people into believing that their public sentiment is more positive than it actually is. 

 

Is sentiment analysis important for businesses?

 

In a word, yes.

Sentiment analysis can unlock so many avenues and opportunities for a business or a personal brand.

Audience Insights

Who doesn’t want to know how and why their customers are thinking. When a business can better understand what resonates with their audience. They can tweak and improve, or maybe even overhaul, their strategies to accommodate this. 

More effective crisis management

Analysing sentiment is a good way to gauge how you audience feels about you, in times of feast and famine. If you are monitoring sentiment, you can better identify online reputational risks and address public concerns promptly and swiftly.

Swift reactions to issues and crises can create a virtuous circle. As a business you’ll be seen to be reacting to issues in a quick, timely and positive manner. You get things done and your audience respects you for that.

Greater brand reputation

Everyone wants to be liked and respected. The more focus you put on creating positive sentiment within your audiences and communities, the greater your brand reputation will be. 

Increased innovation

Sentiment analysis can really benefit businesses that make things. Be it technical, tangible, physical or otherwise. If you put a product out into the world, analysing sentiment should be high on your list of priorities.

Through sentiment analysis, you can gauge feedback on your products and services. What’s good what’s bad, what can be changed, removed or even brought back.

Greater tactical awareness

All of the above gives you a greater tactical awareness as a business. If you putting products and services out into the world, sentiment analysis ensures you’re not just doing it blind.

But if you’re blindly ignoring sentiment analysis, you’re missing out on key customer metrics that can massively help you adapt and grow as a business. 

 With social media, businesses have a ready-made audience sentiment generator. But it should not be treated solely as an aspect of marketing.

 

Taking sentiment beyond social 

 

 Where businesses can find the most benefit from tracking sentiment, is when they take it out of a pure social media context.

 A software company releases a patch update. The patch, however, seems to be causing functionality issues within the user base. So much so that great numbers of users have taken to social media to voice their concerns about the viability and functionality of the software.

A situation like this could have the potential to reach a critical crisis point. If not handled correctly it could lose the business’s current, and potentially future, customers.

 But this is where the greatest synergies can be found between social and marketing teams and the wider business.

When negative feedback is flowing through sentiment. That feedback must be shared. In this example, it should be shared with product and development teams, to fix the problems users are having. 

 When sentiment is shared across all relevant teams, then it becomes truly powerful tool.

 

Is sentiment analysis important for YOUR business?

 

Ask yourself this question, do you want to gain more insight into your customers? Do you want to use that insight to build better relationships with your audience, ultimately leading to a more productive and profitable business. 

By embracing analysis you can do this.

But, and this is the most important thing to note. Simply having access to sentiment analysis will not change things. You have to have the will and the appetite to act on your audience’s responses in order to see actual meaningful results. 

Are your social media teams performing sentiment analysis and is that data and feedback reaching the rest of your teams? 

Because it should be.