With the rise in the capabilities of technology, sentiment analysis is becoming a widely used business tool to evaluate various parameters of the business, such as online marketing success, or the perceived brand image.
Existing social media platforms actively employ sentiment analysis to measure the outcome of an advertisement or the feedback from a post. This has also been criticised when Facebook tried to use sentiment analysis to see if they could manipulate people’s emotions by altering their algorithms to inject negative or positive posts more frequently into their users’ news feeds [1].
Bloomberg has been constantly researching how technology can be assisted to make money. They have successfully showcased how social media can be scraped and sentiment analysis can be adapted to predict the nature of the market. Event-driven is tracked and analysed for a positive, neutral or negative perception, then a decision is made in terms of either increase or reduction in the stock prices. They have claimed that sentiment driven strategies can beat the competition by double-digit standards [2].
Brand monitoring is a relatively new concept. The idea is to derive metrics by passively monitoring user-generated content. The output is then used by the brand to assess their favourability, uniqueness, and strength. Recently, deeper analysis has allowed consumer voice to influence product design. Concept aggression is another advancement in the field, which allows brands to recognise associations between items and meaningful relations from consumers’ texts.
Competition is also tracked to take advantage of trends shift. It helps to identify industry influencers and take advantage of their reviews. Measuring the competitors’ success also allows a company to assess the industry as a whole, and make decisions on investments accordingly [3] [4].
HootSuite is one of the platforms for social media tracking. It can be used to set up monitors for tweet mentions, set up filters, and gauge positivity associated with a word. It combines several existing social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. It shows summarized information in dashboards and presents data in an easy way to read gauges.
Brandwatch is another feature offered by the platform, it watches the competitors, and shows engagement levels and brand reputations. Rapidminer, in its turn, allows brands to perform analysis on unstructured content sources, such as online reviews and social media posts [5].
One of the largest disadvantages of the existing tools is that they fail to take into account the psychographics aspects [4], which Aura can address as it analyses sentiments and neutrality of the user as well. Demographics is another aspect that cannot always be addressed for unstructured content sources [4], which again Aura can address.
References:
[1] The Balance Small Business. (2018). A Look at Social Sentiment and Its Importance in Marketing. [online] Available at: https://www.thebalancesmb.com/what-is-social-sentiment-and-why-is-it-important-3960082 [Accessed 21 Apr. 2018].
[2] Bloomberg Professional Services. (2018). Finding novel ways to trade on sentiment data | Bloomberg Professional Services. [online] Available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/blog/finding-novel-ways-trade-sentiment-data/ [Accessed 21 Apr. 2018].
[3] W3.org. (2018). [online] Available at: https://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt/wiki/images/0/03/Insius_mlode2014.pdf [Accessed 21 Apr. 2018].
[4] Blog.investis.com. (2018). Using sentiment analysis to monitor your company’s reputation. [online] Available at: https://blog.investis.com/using-sentiment-analysis-to-monitor-your-companys-reputation [Accessed 21 Apr. 2018].
[5] Hootsuite Social Media Management. (2018). The Best Sentiment Analysis Tools for Social Media Marketers. [online] Available at: https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-sentiment-analysis-tools/ [Accessed 21 Apr. 2018].