With social media trends changing all the time, it is important to stay up-to-date about new tools and concepts. It is overwhelming to try to produce excellent content, interact with your customers, and follow what is said about your brand and your industry. It can also be difficult to tell if all of your efforts are producing real results for your business. To properly measure this, you need to be tracking the right metrics on social media.

One of the most important measurements is social sentiment

Social sentiment is a way of measuring the emotions behind social media mentions. It is a manner in which you can measure the tone of the conversation that is being had–is this person satisfied, happy, angry, or annoyed? It is not enough to know that something is trending. Sentiment adds context to social media. Without sentiment, data can be easily misleading. For example, if your company was launching a new product and it was receiving a huge amount of mentions, you might automatically assume that the product has been well-received. However, there is the distinct possibility that some or most of these posts were negative.

How Social Sentiment is Measured

Depending on the size of your company, and the amount of social media posts about it, it can be a huge time commitment to measuring sentiment on your own. An entirely thorough review might include reading through each post and assigning a numerical score based on the tone of each post.

“Great bargains at Target” would be identified as having a positive sentiment, whereas “Awful customer service at Target” would register as negative.

Four Ways You Can Use Sentiment

1. Evaluating Your Brand’s Health – To understand customers’ feelings about your brand, it is important to analyze social sentiment regularly. It is an important exercise that aids in your understanding of people’s feelings about your company, product, or service. It can be very beneficial to use an automatic sentiment analysis tool to obtain a simple overview of brand health without delving through each post about your brand.
2. Dealing with a Crisis – Social sentiment can clue you into signals that might indicate dramatic shifts in your brand health. A spike in negative posts about your brand might indicate a developing crisis. Your PR department can use social sentiment tools to find the root of the problem and establish a plan to correct this negativity.
3. Researching the Competition – Social sentiment is a great tool to find out how your product or brand is perceived compared to your competitors. Once you understand your competitors’ respective sentiments, you can strategize about ways to change the conversation about your brand.
4. Moving Forward-  Using these powerful social sentiment measuring tools, you can keep up with the ever-changing conversation about your brand and stay relevant well into the future.