Using Sentiment Analysis For Your Brand

⌛  By Kaylin R. Staten ⌛

Hourglass Media is a Lover.

That means: 

“As the Lover, you are passionate and devoted to your people. You cherish pleasure and relationships. You desire a world where people appreciate beauty in life, so aesthetics are crucial to blazoning your brand message.” (Source: https://www.kayeputnam.com/brandality-quiz/)

As a company, we love doing what we do and building meaningful, long-lasting relationships with others. We lead with emotions and data, seeing the silver linings in nearly every situation with empathy and grace. We incorporate what we love personally in order to be our best professional selves. Our biggest fear? Not being passionate about what we do.

In reality, we aren’t a one-size-fits-all brand. We also have touches of the Explorer, Creator, Caregiver, and Sage.

It’s a natural fit for us to blend our Lover and other brand archetypes into sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis is when you analyze writings and other components to measure the emotional tone they convey. In essence, we want to know if our target audiences feel positively, negatively, or neutral about a certain topic. This tactic is used for reputation management, customer service, and crisis communications planning and execution. 

As public relations practitioners, we add sentiment analysis to our strategies and tactics on a regular basis. When we conduct a content audit or assess public opinion centered on awareness or another initiative, we pay attention to what our target audiences think and feel. We see which actions they take based on those thoughts and feelings.

How can you add sentiment analysis to your brand or organization? Here are a few ways you can begin this process: 

Blend your brand archetype with your data collection.

This includes the age-old tactic of market research. You can do this based on the slant of an article, comments your followers posted on your own social media accounts, and how well a blog post performed on your website. The possibilities of data collection are endless, and they can give you a clear picture of what your current and prospective target audience members need to hear, see, and experience with your own content. Analyze what you need to know for your company, industry, and target audiences without getting hung up on every number and emotion. Use what you absolutely need and discard the clutter.

You can even give a Likert-scale-based score for your sentiment analyses, with 1 being the most negative to 10 being the most positive. And in today’s emoji-loving world, you can also use emojis in your content management system or other data-collection method. Do what works best for you. I like to measure my sentiment analysis using the Airtable platform. (Not an ad -- it’s actually something we use #behindthehourglass that makes our lives so much easier!) 

Add it to your existing business plan and overall strategy. 

Once you know how each piece of your communications puzzle fazes your audience, look at themes that consistently come up. On an external basis, you may see that your target audiences love to keep up with the news, but they hate when news items become too politically slanted. You may notice that your click-through rates are higher when you post about a particular subject and lower when you communicate about something else. You can also use sentiment analysis to carve out your brand’s niche and to see if there’s something missing in the market that you can add. Survey your audience to see what they want and need. Pay attention to your tone, messaging, and overall communications strategies. Are they working based on the data you have collected, or do you need to make some adjustments along the way?

Plug sentiment analysis into your AI goals.

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence is here. It’s not something that will be developed in the future because it’s already here. Use this to your advantage instead of shying away from it. You can use AI to do the work for you and measure sentiment analysis based on the back-end parameters you set. Set up your parameters based on positive-to-negative keywords, hashtags, and other KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Learn more here. Of course, AI services are not free, but doing your research will allow you to access free resources and information to aid in decision-making.

This Brand24 blog post will also give you some perspective about sentiment analysis: https://brand24.com/blog/sentiment-analysis/. 

Using sentiment analysis can make or break your brand’s personality, decide whether an angry customer or client will return or stop working with you, and help you seek out incredibly happy customers who would make top-of-the-line brand ambassadors. The possibilities are endless, but just make sure you know how your customers feel and what they want so you can better serve them and do your due diligence for your company. 

Kaylin R. Staten, APR, is an award-winning public relations practitioner and writer based in Huntington, WV with nearly 16 years of professional communications experience. As CEO and founder of Hourglass Media, she uses her compassionate spirit and expertise to delve into the heart of clients’ stories. She is a recovering perfectionist, mental health advocate, wife, expectant baby + cat mom and Leia Organa aficionado. Connect with Kaylin on LinkedIn.