Sentiment analytics has proven to be a useful tool for marketers; it helps them identify if their business is engaging its target audience or not. Let us understand how.

While it is always a challenge to start a company from scratch, technology has made it easier for budding entrepreneurs to keep track of how their business is performing. A technology that has transformed the way large-scale enterprises, startups, and more importantly, SMB marketers’ function, is sentiment analytics.

In simple words, sentiment analytics is a form of data mining that uses advanced technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and computational linguistics to extract and identify subjective information on websites, social media, and other similar forums.

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The tools used for sentiment analysis scan the content and identify and mine data points that present emotion as either positive, neutral, or negative. The data could be related to comments on social media, customer reviews on your website or online forums, or mere engagement with your brand on mobile.

Although the machine learning algorithms in sentiment analytics are highly capable of identifying emotions by reading and extracting data, sarcastic comments or irony is difficult to interpret for these models.

Even so, sentiment analytics has proven to be a useful tool for marketers to help grow their business. The main goal being, to understand how your business is engaging with its target market.  

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Once that is in place, you can focus on other aspects of digital marketing such as monitoring customer engagement, responding to queries or reviews, tracking social mentions, and so on. Now, let us take social media as an example and understand how sentiment analysis makes a difference in this tactic:

Social media engagement is an inescapable area for all types of businesses today. And your small business is no exception. Social media increases your brand’s visibility, attracts more customers and drives higher profits. And sentiment analytics factors into that massively.

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Social media automatically opens your business to a broader customer base and target markets because it covers all your demographics. Not just that, it also allows for two-way communication between the brand and its customers on a more personal level. Additionally, business owners get to address customer queries quickly. Today, customer service is more about the speed of response, and social media allows you to do just that.

An essential use of sentiment analytics in social media is to gauge how your customers are responding to your posts, shares, links, and so on. By using this information, you can create more customized social media campaigns that will, in turn, get you a better business.

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Simply knowing the sentiment doesn't do much for you in terms of marketing. What you need are specifics and details. Metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) are values by which you can identify and measure the performance of your business or website. Here are some of the critical metrics to keep track of:

1. Volume

Because social media trends are fleeting, it is vital to measure how much engagement your brand is receiving. Volume does that for you. It tells you how many people are talking about your business or your posts on social media. Although not a vital metric, it throws light on the general pulse that consumers feel about you.

2. Reach

This metric represents the social media reach of your business. In other words, it measures the reach of your posts. It denotes the number of people your posts are reaching on social media versus the number of people you can potentially reach out to.

3. Engagement

Another vital metric to measure how much buzz your business generates on social media is engagement. This could be in the form of likes, comments, and shares. Every marketer knows that social media engagement can do wonders for the business.

Engagement could be the turning point because social media posts can go viral in a few hours or not get noticed for months. High positive engagement is a sign that there will be more sales for you.

The reach is high in such a scenario, and the conversation about your business is positive - leading to higher conversions.

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4. Influence

Influencer marketing is a great way to get other individuals to promote and spread awareness of your business. This is not the same thing as the number of followers because that alone is not sufficient to determine how much engagement your business is getting.

That's why there are various tools such as TwentyFeet and Crowdbooster that help you calculate an influencer score to give you a more detailed idea.

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5. Competition

Perhaps, one of the most underrated metrics is the comparison of your business performance as compared to that of your competitors.

Understanding what works for them versus what works for you gives you a clear picture of what is going well for you and which areas need to be improved upon. Also, you can even understand what the things you should not do; learn from the competitors' mistakes.

Over to you

In a day and age, where an increasing number of customers interact with brands online, it is necessary to know how they feel about your business. Sentiment analytics, if leveraged properly, can give great actionable insights into how well or poorly your business is performing.

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