Social Media Brand Tracking

Due to the phenomenal growth of social media and social networking, gone are the days where internet was mostly based on information and facts. Today, we see that there is a sizable amount of data that includes opinion or sentiment.  This can come from ratings, reviews, comments, and etc.  Hence, recent and emerging research focuses on social sentiment analysis research and social sentiment brand tracking, as well as other techniques in evaluating opinion, part of social media data analysis; a topic SVRG covered in a recent blog posting. When accurately assessed, these opinions and sentiments can provide valuable information informing strategic marketing and business decisions.

Social sentiment research or analysis often refers to the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP), computational linguistics and text analytics.  The goal is to determine the attitudes, opinions, and emotional states or intended emotional communications of a customer or prospect.  Opinion today has turned into a tool that can often make or break your product.

Social media brand tracking is typically used by companies to scan and track keywords use public in social media (twitter, blogs, news, etc.) associated to their business and its competitors. These keywords could be brand names, industry jargon, market landscape words, etc.  The content is then pulled together (that includes those keywords from different social media outlets) for a set period of time social sentiment is tracked. NLP is then used on the results to provide a foundation for the strategic insights. Given the large sums of data that can be potentially collected, experienced analysis plays an important role bringing everything into perspective beyond the NLP to inform strategic decision making.

Social media sentiment research is strategically important to businesses in many ways, a few include:

• Measure Success: Social sentiment analysis will help us understand positive and negative comments associated with a brand and its competition, providing a real-world and real-time measuring stick. Success of marketing efforts and brand equity research can also be tracked by observing social sentiment.
• Social Media Brand Strategy: By performing social sentiment analysis research businesses can better align their social media brand strategy to their complete marketing and business strategies.
• Customer Insights: A business can learn a lot from customer’s comments, especially when cross referencing known demographic and firma-graphic indicators.  For example, a business can look at the comments’ location, positive or negative association, profile information, etc.
• Competitive Insights:  Not only can businesses learn about their own brand, the same information can be learned about the competition. A business can monitor and then respond to competitors’ actions in real-time.
• Customer Service: Studies have shown that when customers talk about brands on social media they tend to “vent” or express dissatisfaction.  These public displays of dissatisfaction are perfect opportunities for marketing and customer service teams to “narrow-cast” responses in proactive attempt to return the customer to satisfaction.

We here at SVRG have a variety of tools to allow users to track the sentiment of their brands in the social media and social networking space such as part of our Opinion Bridge™ offering.

For more information about social sentiment research, please contact us or leave your comments below.