To enable social success, which impacts search success, be clear about the metrics you need focus on for sentiment analysis and the tools you deploy to capture, organize, and report those metrics. Customer optimization relies on a solid understanding of your social network’s composition and, more importantly, its activity.

Importance of Performing Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis has helped some of the world’s biggest brands understand their customer sentiment and enabled them to plan the best long-term strategies and train their employees better. Considering sentiment analysis utilizes social media, mobile apps, websites and forums to collect this priceless data, it becomes a veritable mine for organizations based on which they can improve their products, services, brand reputation and more to become market leaders.

 Enterprises across the globe and in various domains are renovating their business offerings and trying to implement all that’s required to embrace digital transformation in a bid to become leaders of the digital race. An adoption, continuous deployment, real-time business monitoring, faster time to market and customer experience are the most critical drivers of these initiatives.

Customers today have become highly emotive, and they love to share their experiences (sentiments) about the products they use and their interaction with brands. These users are not shy in presenting their feedback — regardless of whether it’s positive or negative — and share their sentiments regarding the products and services they use via mobile applications across multiple platforms. These platforms include Twitter, Facebook, the App Store, Google Play forums, review sites and blogs.

Few of the more effective breakout social KPIs to analyse for uncovering consumer sentiment:

• Amplification rate – tracks the rate at which your audience actively shares your content through their social networks
• Applause rate – reveals the rate at which your social community provides positive feedback through shares, +1s, and likes
• Audience growth rate – measures the rate of social network growth over a period of time
• Average engagement rate – tracks the average engagement against your follower base
• Visitor frequency rate – compares new and returning followers

The key to successful engagement is sentiment prioritization:

1. Influence: Because social media mentions are plentiful, prioritisation tools must continue evolving. Of the 10,000 tweets and blog posts about your brand, how do you pick the top 50 to focus on?
2. If you need to neutralize the mentions that hurt your brand the most, you should drill down into negative mentions, identify the content coming from the most influential people in your industry, understand how far each tweet travelled, and how many people were impacted by this content. If someone blogs and tweets the same negative mention about you, how do you account for that? How do you quantify the multiplied effect of cross-platform communication originating from the same person? Including influencer analytics alongside sentiment, measurement is becoming a standard of the social media monitoring industry.
3. Reputation: Taking the influencer concept a step further, each notable user should have a social media reputation profile. If someone’s negative sentiment indexes higher than average (i.e. that person hates everything equally), then that person’s negative sentiment should be somewhat discounted.
4. Intensity: As far as sentiment algorithms are concerned, part of a successful prioritization process is going to be identifying the intensity of each mention. Ability to cross-reference intensity, influence, trajectory, velocity and sentiment of each social media mention will drive us towards a reliable priority system.