Monitoring Social Media Sentiments for Marketing

Through social monitoring in Raventools, we are able to monitor social networks for important keywords as well as explore the sentiments within our industries. Sentiment, or the general attitude toward a specific profession, person, or topic, is divided into three categories: positive, neutral, and negative. As monitoring these sentiments can be helpful for branding, content production, and marketing, we decided to take a closer look and analyze the general attitude for three general professions.

To explore the full scope of the tool, we examined the sentiments toward police officers, politicians, and attorneys, gauging the negative, neutral, and positive postings on social media. Here are the results:

The below graph shows the number of positive versus negative posts regarding police officers, attorneys, and politicians on Facebook and Twitter. The below data is representative of posts containing the words “police officer” “attorney” and “politician” that were rated overall positive and negative for the entire month of May. An example of a negative post would be one that bashes a police officer for writing a ticket, while a positive example would be one that states qualities a person hopes to see in the next person to take office. We did manually check each of the posts to ensure that they actually were negative and positive and not just containing keywords that are commonly accepted as one sentiment over the other (i.e. bad, good).

 

With information on the negative, neutral, and positive comments about police officers, precincts can monitor what tricks people are using to avoid cops, how people are sharing information about accidents, and what stands out to a person when being written a citation.

 

With this information, a politician can determine the general public’s stance on a particular issue, what debate topics are most important, and what people want in a candidate. In addition, if trying to recover from a recent scandal or setback, a politician can gauge whether the public is past the issue.

 

An attorney can take this information and adapt his commercial and marketing style, make note of what major concerns and complaints people have about attorneys, and get insight into what matters most to clients.

How can this information be used in the marketing realm

Tracking the general social sentiment toward an industry, group, product, or service can help a business determine what matters to their clients. By having an understanding of what the people who follow your industry care about, you can better mold your overall marketing strategy to fit those preferences. Social media monitoring is about listening to your what your audience is saying and adapting your posting style, content, and the way you talk about your brand and products. While a politician may want to gauge the public’s sentiment toward their opposition, a marketer may want to determine what positive and negative things the social media world is saying about a competitor. Tracking this information can also give you awareness of what people really think about your brand–because you can’t always ask that question and get valid information–and get real people giving their real opinions without using a focus group or market research survey. 

Sentiment is just one of the many monitoring tools that help make social media a valid marketing resource for your company.