Social Media Sentiment Analysis: A Comprehensive Guide

Social media sentiment analysis provides valuable insights into how people perceive your clients’ brands.

Understanding audience feelings is key to crafting strategies that enhance brand reputation and loyalty.

However, managing a deluge of likes, shares, and comments—especially when juggling hundreds of clients—can be overwhelming. How can you perform social media sentiment analysis both efficiently and effectively?

In this guide, we walk you through the fundamentals of sentiment analysis, offering essential steps, helpful tips and tricks, and tools to simplify the process.

What you will learn

• Understanding social media sentiment analysis
• Social media sentiment analysis vs Social media tracking 
• Why social media sentiment analysis is crucial
• 3 Easy steps to run a social media sentiment analysis
• How to use sentiment analysis and social media tracking together
• Turn social media sentiment analysis into insights

Understanding social media sentiment analysis

Social media sentiment analysis examines and interprets the opinions, attitudes, and emotions expressed in social media posts about a topic, brand, or product. 

The analysis helps you understand the language used and how people talk about your clients’ brands in social media reviews, comments, and other interactions.

Type of social media sentiment

Social media sentiment can be:

• Positive. Positive sentiment includes mentions that express happiness, approval, or satisfaction with your clients’ products, services, or brands. Examples of positive sentiment include compliments, positive social reviews, and enthusiastic mentions
• Neutral. Neutral sentiment includes mentions, comments, or reviews that are neither positive nor negative. The sentiment doesn’t express strong opinions or are just statements of facts
• Negative. Negative sentiment includes dissatisfied comments, complaints, or criticisms of your clients’ brands or products 

Social media sentiment analysis vs Social media tracking 

Sentiment analysis digs into the emotional tone within social media conversations about your clients’ brands. 

It’s more than counting likes or mentions but understanding the feelings behind them, whether frustrated, happy, or indifferent. 

The emotional insight helps you gauge the perceptions of your clients’ audiences, allowing you to adjust strategies and inform your social media playbooks accordingly. 

[Must read: How to Build a Social Media Playbook (For Agencies)]

On the other hand, social media tracking focuses on metrics to determine how often people talk about your clients’ brands, where they’re mentioned, and who’s engaging with them.

Tracking helps you measure the reach and effectiveness of your clients’ social media marketing efforts.

While social media tracking tells you what’s happening, sentiment analysis explains WHY it’s happening by unveiling the emotions behind the data. 

[Must read: Outsourcing Social Media Marketing: A Guide for Agencies]

Leveraging the two can give you a whole picture of your clients’ brand presence and impact.

Here’s an example. A campaign racks up shares, so tracking says it’s a hit. Sentiment analysis then shows that most people sharing it are annoyed. Without both views, you’d double down on the wrong thing.

When to use social media sentiment analysis

Lean on sentiment analysis when you need to know how people feel. For example, when a client launches a campaign and wants to know how it’s landing, or when you’re handling a PR crisis and need to gauge public reaction.

When to use social media tracking

Turn to tracking when you need numbers: a campaign’s reach, the clicks a new ad generated or follower growth over time. It’s the foundation for measuring your clients’ campaign performance and ROI.

Why social media sentiment analysis is crucial

Conducting sentiment analysis on social media offers the following benefits. 

• Refines brand messaging. Social media sentiment analysis helps you tailor your clients’ content to better resonate with their target audiences. It helps make their communication more effective in engaging audiences
• Data-driven decision making. By leveraging sentiment analysis insights gathered from online feedback platforms, businesses can make informed, strategic decisions to enhance their products, campaigns, and customer service.
• Proactive brand reputation management. Analyzing social media sentiment helps your clients spot and address negative sentiments promptly while capitalizing on positive ones. The strategy can help clients protect and enhance their brand reputations

3 Easy steps to run a social media sentiment analysis

Running a social media sentiment analysis can depend on your tools and strategies, but you can kick off the process with the steps below. 

1. Track social media mentions

Find conversations and interactions that mention your clients’ brands on social media. 

[Must read: Social Media Interaction Post Ideas This 2022]

Track the comments, messages, reviews, and mentions that tag and don’t tag your clients social media accounts. 

Use the social media management platform Vista Social to simplify this process. 

The platform lets you set up Listeners to track conversations about your clients’ brands based on specific keywords (such as brand names and social media handles). 

[Must read: Social Media Handles: How to Pick And Create One]

Once the social media listening tool is running, it will pull all the messages, comments, and reviews that mention your specified keywords.

For instance, you can create a Listener that pulls reviews that mention positive experiences. 

You can view, manage, filter, and respond to these mentions directly through the platform’s Social Inbox.

The Inbox unifies all the messages from your clients’ connected social media profiles.

You can label, archive, and mark conversations as spam from the social media engagement feature’s Inbox. 

You can also edit, deactivate, or remove your Listeners.

Another handy feature is the platform’s AI Assistant, which can instantly write or refine your replies in seconds. 

The tool streamlines replying to customer or follower comments, queries, and mentions.

Prompt responses help improve the user experience with your clients’ brands, resulting in positive sentiments.  

Don’t miss out on Vista Social’s other features, such as its social media publishing tool that lets you create, customize, and schedule posts for auto-posting.

2. Analyze the sentiment within mentions

Review the terms that indicate sentiment within your clients’ mentions. 

Consider the types of positive, negative, or neutral words and languages that people use when mentioning or talking about your clients’ brands. 

For example:

• Positive words can include great, amazing, love, perfect, best
• Neutral words can be so-so, okay, alright, not-bad
• Negative terms can include awful, worst, terrible, bad, hate

People can also use other terms specific to your clients’ products, services, brands, or industries. 

If you’re tracking sentiment manually, ensure you get the context behind the words used. 

For instance, someone can sarcastically say they had the “best” customer experience with your clients’ brands.  

Leverage dedicated tools that track and analyze the sentiment behind specific keywords. 

For example, many sentiment analysis tools can track keywords and analyze and categorize them as positive, neutral, or negative. 

The tools can also have features that:

• Search popular topics and themes, including what the most popular negative and positive posts are about
• Find popular posts related to your search terms and filter them by channel, sentiment, and more

On the Vista Social Enterprise plan, sentiment analysis is built into Listeners. You can set a Listener to filter the conversations it pulls by sentiment: positive, mixed, neutral or negative.

You can also generate sentiment reports and schedule them, so your team and clients get regular updates on how audiences feel about each brand.

3. Calculate the social sentiment score

Follow these tips to calculate your clients’ social sentiment score.

• Assign numerical values to each of your clients’ analyzed content pieces. For instance:
  • Positive comments: +1
  • Neutral comments: 0
  • Negative comments: -1
• Add the scores across all pieces of content to get the total
• Make the score more meaningful by normalizing it based on the data volume. It can mean scaling the score to a standard range (-100 to +100) or calculating the average sentiment score per post 
• Consider factors such as trends, volume, engagement levels, and the context of gathered sentiments for a more accurate sentiment score interpretation

The final score should give you an overview of how negatively or positively audiences view your clients’ brands. 

How to use sentiment analysis and social media tracking together

You get the most out of sentiment analysis when you pair it with tracking. Here’s a simple way to combine the two.

Start with tracking for a performance snapshot

Look at clicks, impressions, reach and shares to see which posts are getting attention and which hashtags drive traffic. That tells you where to look more closely.

Layer in sentiment to explain the numbers

A spike in comments looks good until you find out most of them are complaints. Sentiment shows whether engagement comes from enthusiasm, frustration or confusion, so you know how to adjust your clients’ messaging.

Use sentiment when mentions surge

When tracking alerts you to a jump in mentions, check the sentiment before you respond. It tells you whether you’re looking at a PR win to amplify or a problem to address.

Measure again after you make changes

After you adjust a campaign, check whether reach and clicks moved, then check whether sentiment improved. Repeat the cycle each time you make a change.

Turn social media sentiment analysis into insights

Analyzing social media sentiment can give you actionable insights to fine-tune your strategies, help clients address customer issues, and leverage the positives for their brands. 

Dive into the data, uncover the emotions behind it, and use the insights to help clients build stronger and longer customer relationships.

Use Vista Social to streamline your efforts to monitor social media sentiment.

Create your Vista Social account now.