WHY IS SENTIMENT ANALYSIS IMPORTANT?

BY SARAH PHILLIPS

Do you know what that influencer said about your brand and how it will impact your business?  Are you aware of what the media is saying about your industry at the moment? And did you hear your closest competitor rolled out a campaign which resulted in extensive earned media coverage?

It’s questions like these that sum up the importance of sentiment analysis for brands, companies and organisations. If you can’t answer them, you’re likely not making the most of sentiment analysis - and, you’re in the right place reading this blog.

With vast media channels, influencers continuing to play an important part in the marketing mix and customers able to express their feelings more publicly than ever before, sentiment analysis is key to understanding the overall opinion, feeling or attitudes toward your brand and industry. If you’re not taking notice of sentiment and using the tools to derive insights, then how do you remain informed, aware and most importantly, ahead?

What are the benefits of sentiment analysis?

‍Exploring the sentiment around your brand or area of interest has many benefits. By benchmarking your own brand against your competitors in the overall media landscape, you’re able to gain an understanding of the media content your potential customers have been exposed to. These factors can help inform your communications strategy and shape the public perception of your organisation or brand.

Sentiment analysis can also be used to understand influencers. If you’ve ever found yourself asking who the right person is to help you promote your next big brand campaign, sentiment tools can help define influencers that align best with your brand. On the other hand, sentiment analysis can also help identify those who might be damaging your reputation. This is vital in today’s socially-focussed landscape where a single comment or action can impact a brand, within seconds.

Sentiment analysis also provides context to the numbers. It’s not enough to simply measure the volume of coverage your latest campaign achieved, it’s important to determine the nature of the coverage. On a larger scale, sentiment can help you identify areas where negative sentiment is bubbling from journalists in mainstream media or consumers on social media, and give you the opportunity to respond quickly, adjust your communications plan and improve aspects like customer service. Alternatively, you’ll also have the opportunity to spot your brand fans, boost reviews and identify ways to improve products.

These are just some of the reasons communications professionals should be taking notice of sentiment and using the tools to derive insights that can improve the present, and the future, business strategy.

How is sentiment analysis determined?

‍It’s one thing to reap the benefits of sentiment analysis, but communication professionals should also understand how the tools work to achieve those benefits. Don’t let the words ‘Natural Language Processing’ and ‘Entity Sentiment Analysis’ scare you, we’ll break it down.  

Truescope uses Natural Language Processing to analyse the text within a media item and identify the emotional words used to determine for example, an author’s attitude.

Unlike most media intelligence platforms, when determining a sentiment score, Truescope analyses the emotional words found within the text and the extent of words found. This means media items can be accurately differentiated between neutral content and content with mixed viewpoints. By including the extent of words found alongside these scores, you’ll receive accurate insights as to whether the content is truly neutral or a balanced mix of both positive and negative viewpoints.

It’s also vital for brands, companies and organisations to understand sentiment when being mentioned within larger media items. A media item might be scored as negative, however the mention of the brand may have been positive. Truescope’s Entity Sentiment Analysis provides communicators sentiment expressed about the people, organisations and places within the text. This means you’re provided a more specific and accurate view of the attitudes and opinions that have potential to affect your brand.

Sentiment isn't straightforward. That’s why Truescope provides the tools to visualise, compare, and interrogate sentiment by breaking down sentiment by topic, people and organisations as well as allowing communicators to analyse sentiment over time and compare media types, sources, and authors.

By using measurement and evaluation tools like sentiment analysis to derive insights, communicators will work towards better informing communication strategies, improving reputation and also influencing brand perception - now surely there’s some positive sentiment in that!