What is sentiment analysis?

With the rise in online stores, increased online shopping, and social media usage, customers have found an easier way to air their thoughts about products and services. A business can find itself trending on different online platforms either for good or bad. In such a situation, it’s upon a business to quickly make sense of the message within the numerous texts online. 

But how?

The answer lies in sentiment analysis. That’s why any business today should consider investing in data scraping for sentiment analysis. 

Defining sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is the process of determining the emotional tone behind written texts. It involves using scientific methods to analyze customer reviews and comments to understand the emotions, attitudes, and opinions behind an online mention. 

Most sentiment analysis tools employ artificial intelligence to categorize underlying sentiment as either negative, positive, or neutral. Sentiment analysis tools automate the process of gathering feedback and processing the messages contained in it. Sentiment analysis is helpful in business, politics, research, financial investments and other areas. 

Why is sentiment analysis important – use cases

1. Marketing

Having high numbers for your marketing efforts isn’t enough. It’s important to consider the sentiment. If you get a lot of shares, likes, and comments on your social media campaigns, going further to conduct sentiment analysis will give you context to the numbers. What are they saying? Use this information to strategize your future campaigns.

Additionally, sentiment analysis can enable you to track opinions on new product features to gain an insight into industry trends.

2. Reputation management for brands

Companies invest a lot of resources in creating a positive brand image. It’s important to guard it dearly. Sentiment analysis enables businesses to discover what customers think about their brand. It’s also possible to point out customer grievances in good time and respond to concerns before they affect their brand image. 

3. Improve products and services

Customer reviews come with information about positive and negative experiences when using a product. Other customers go into details about their wins and challenges with a product and offer suggestions where companies can improve. Analyzing such texts can help a business discover opportunities for improvement or new product development to meet their clients’ needs.  

4. Research

Businesses and individuals can use sentiment analysis to gain important data to boost their content or advise their investment decisions. If you are creating content, collecting opinions about a subject and including it in your writing makes it more authoritative. When it comes to financial investments, sentiment analysis can point out reputational issues or political outcomes that can affect the stock market. An individual or business can use this data to determine the right places to put their money. 

5. For competitor analysis

Even as you check your reviews, you could use the same systems to analyze those of your competition. This makes it easy for you to determine how your product reviews compare with your competitors. You’ll also understand how your target audience views your competitors. It’s important to keep tabs on your competition if you want to stay on top. 

6. Customer feedback and improve service

By reading the emotions behind customer feedback or comments, it’s easy for businesses to determine the level of customer satisfaction. This is important especially in an era where customer service goes beyond in-house or telephone support agents. Many customers interact with products online and are free to leave their comments. By analyzing feedback and picking the main message quickly, it’s possible to make changes to address their needs and improve customer experience.  

How to do web scraping for sentiment analysis

Before technology, brands had to task someone to go through hundreds of posts, comments and survey results to get their audience’s opinion on their products or brand. This was not only cumbersome but also non-effective. Fortunately, today, it’s possible to automate the process and gain the required insights at a glance. 

One way is by using opinion mining tools. Most of them employ artificial intelligence and natural language processing. If you go online, you’ll come across free and paid tools for sentiment analysis. Of course, to get a powerful tool that can compare a wide segment of data and give desired results, you’ll need to part with money. Some tools can be expensive especially for a small business.

If you are a startup who wishes to conduct sentiment analysis for cheap, consider using a scraping tool. It’s the most convenient and budget-friendly method of gathering large amounts of Google SERP data for analysis. Use a SERP scraping API to scrape news headlines, social media post previews for analyzing the sentiment behind this data. Click to learn more how scraping for sentiment analysis works. 

Conclusion

The opinions and feelings of customers should matter to any brand. Most customers want to shop where they are treated right. It’s not always easy to tell the customer’s attitudes and emotions behind a comment, social media shares or likes. With sentiment analysis, businesses won’t need to guess how their customers feel about their brand, service or products.