Every business wants to know how their clients and customers feel. Sentiment can take hours to analyze emails, reviews, and social media posts to figure out what the consensus is on your products and services. Reading every text generated about your brand on social media is a time-consuming and expensive way to do marketing research.
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What is Sentiment Analysis?
It is the answer to researching brand awareness without laborious and outdated processes. Automated solutions evaluate texts and detect how people feel about your brand. Through machine learning processes, the text interprets to be positive, negative, or neutral. More advanced tools can interpret intensity and nuance in sentiment.
For example, automated tools will rate a review for a toy that reads, “The toy is terrific. My child loves this toy,” as positive because through machine learning, it recognizes words like “terrific” and “loves” as positive. It will rate “This toy is terrible. It broke the first day my child played with it” as damaging because it assigns a negative rating to the words “terrible” and “broke.”
What Is the Process of Sentiment Analysis
The following steps outline how to perform sentiment analysis:
- Data Gathering
Using a web proxy and scraping tools is essential for retrieving data from pages that contain expressions of consumer sentiment. These pages may include reviews, social media updates, or search engine results that provide every mention of your brand on the internet.
- Cleaning Text
After you retrieve the text, it should be a strip of punctuation stop words and additions that may slow down the process of text analysis.
- Sentiment Analysis
Once the text has prepared, automated algorithms will analyze the data. Conditional on how sophisticated the technology is, the text will be rated as positive, negative, and neutral or can assign with a broader range of sentiments, such as anger, enthusiasm, or uncertainty.
- Interpreting Results
Once you have analyzed the sentiment in the text, translating the results into strategy is the final step. Ensure the sentiment analysis is dated so you can connect the sentiment to what was going on in terms of offerings, promotions, and trends. Getting a clear idea of how customers feel about your brand is a guide to refining your marketing efforts.
General Sentiment Analysis Challenges
The ability of tools to classify certain words like “terrific” and “awful” by matching them up with a programmed sentiment dictionary is a straightforward process. The more significant challenge is for machine learning to pick up nuance, to catch connotations, and detect the meaning behind sarcasm and colloquialisms.
For instance, if someone writes, “The food was okay,” the sentiment analysis tool may interpret the comment as positive. The word “okay” itself may seem like a positive rating, but the actual connotation is only a lukewarm to cool approval of the food.
There can be a similar issue with sarcasm. If a customer review reads, “The pizza arrived an hour late. Perfect. We had given up and warm up leftovers,” the word “perfect” may rate as positive when the writer had a sarcastic tone that could only detect the context.
There are advanced machine learning tools that train to pick up on deeper nuance. It is one reason it is important to find a holistic approach to opinion mining with technology that goes beyond merely interpreting words to understand the nuance of entire passages with an efficiency that can compare to human readers.
Sentiment Analysis Challenges By Industry
Retail, Restaurants, Entertainment, Hospitality, and Travel
Industries that have a strong B2C element enjoy a large amount and frequency of direct feedback from customers through review sites, eCommerce platforms, and social media posts. The challenge of opinion mining in these industries is one of scale. Since there is so much customer-generated information, it can be a challenge to retrieve and analyze it.
Sentiment analysis in these industries require tools that can handle retrieving and analyzing a large amount of data. Scraping means that design for many pages and algorithms with capabilities for scale is essential for this analysis.
Investment Research, Lending, Insurance
Looking for clues for investment should not just include numbers. Using sentiment analysis to interpret tone on earnings calls and interviews with CEOs and CFOs can provide clues on the state of the business.
It is useful not just for investment research but also for researching competitors. Lenders and insurance companies can also gauge signals about the security of the business before providing funding or insurance protection. The challenge is to find a sentiment analysis solution that reads between the lines and interprets subtle messages in speech.
Manufacturers
Manufacturers can analyze communication with buyers to detect which can be relied on to make additional orders. Carmakers have posted surveys on social media to find out which makes of cars were the most popular. This information is valuable to determine manufacturing targets and goals and what buyers and end customers want.
The Importance of Sentiment Analysis
Knowing how your brand perceives can help you draw up a roadmap to success. Using scraping tools and advanced algorithms for analyzing text gives you precise feedback on how customers feel about your product or service. Generating new strategies based on these insights can help your company attract new leads and boost sales.
