Finding out how people feel about your brand or product is an important part of market research, and one way of doing this is through sentiment analysis. To find out if sentiment analysis is right for your brand, we’ve gathered all the information you need.
What is sentiment analysis?
Sentiment analysis, sometimes known as opinion mining, describes the different processes, methods, techniques and approaches that gather information about how a customer really feels towards a product or a brand. It’s used to find an attitude towards something through words said online.
Sentiment analysis is dependent on technology, in a way that other market research approaches are not and is most effectively used online on social media networking platforms. It monitors public opinion on particular topics and can extract insights from social data. This way, a brand can discover their online reputation and work to either improve this or maintain it, if it’s good. It can also be used in customer feedback like reviews as it can identify results of bad reviews and problems online of which a brand can act on sooner rather than later.
Why should brands use sentiment analysis?
Sentiment analysis is a vital part of a brand’s market research or customer service and is used in businesses ranging from e-commerce to marketing and even politics. It allows a brand to know what customers really think of their products or services, as well as what they think of competitors which is important. It differs from other market research methods as it uses natural language processing to categorise posts online into positive, negative and neutral. The algorithm on which it is based, is designed in order to successfully identify adjectives commonly associated with positivity like ‘fantastic’ or ‘wonderful’, as well as negative words like ‘awful’ and ‘terrible’.
Is it reliable?
With all technology dependent methods, sentiment analysis is not always easy. Although far more advanced than alternate methods, if a post has both a positive and negative word in it, the tool will struggle to understand which it should be categorised as. It also struggles to understand sarcasm and on top of this, some opinions cannot just be categorised into either of the three positive, negative or neutral categories it has.
As with all of our projects, we will always work with you and your brand to get the best results we can during a Market Research project. If you’d like to learn more about what people think of your brand or services, then get in touch with us today.