Are you monitoring your businesses ‘brand health’, and actively working to improve this key metric, and maximize performance?
Brand health, which started as a quirky definition, has become an important indicator of success for most companies, yet, the definition might still sound pretty confusing to some marketers out there
So to begin, let’s break it down.
What is brand health?
Brand health is a collection of metrics which represent brand awareness, brand reputation, and brand’s share of voice. It includes customer satisfaction and the opinions potential customers have on the company.
How is brand health measured?
The easiest way to measure brand health is by using focus groups, questionnaires, and social media. The latter provides the most insight, however it won’t suit every company out there. If your target audience doesn’t use social media, there’s no point in turning to social networks, blogs, and forums to assess your brand awareness and reputation. That said, such a scenario is fairly unlikely these days.
Given that brand health is a collection of metrics, it’s safe to assume that you need more than one tool to get a clear understanding of how well your brand is doing. In this post, we’ll focus on tools that measure sentiment – sentiment analysis tools that show your brand’s reputation on social media and beyond.
What are sentiment analysis tools for?
Sentiment analysis tools interpret a text (e.g. a social media post) in a way that aims to reveal the intent and tone behind it. Then, the tools compound the data and display cumulative brand sentiment across a range of inputs in charts and graphs, so that the businesses can monitor relevant trends without having to go through each post.
Big data enables businesses to keep tabs on positive or negative opinions, and respond to any spikes as they occur, which thereby enables them to maintain brand health.
Limitations of sentiment analysis tools
Even though machine learning is an increasingly powerful mechanism, the assessment of tone in written language is not yet 100% accurate.
People write sarcastically, they use slang, they make spelling mistakes and use ambiguous wording. All of these factors make it impossible for tools to always get it right, but the advantage of larger data sets is that even though some of the samples will be wrongly assessed, the overall results – the graphs and charts the company gets – will likely be indicative.
Now that you know the basics of sentiment analysis, let’s take look at some of the best tools available today to help you monitor your brand sentiment.
1. Awario
Awario is a social media monitoring and analysis tool. It covers all major social media networks, news, blogs, forums, and the web. The in-built sentiment analysis feature – available in all plans – sorts brand mentions into positive, negative, and neutral. You get a graph that shows you how your mentions have grown over time and how their overall sentiment has changed. In addition to the brand’s sentiment, you can see the topics that get mentioned most often when people speak about your company.
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2. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is one of the go-to social media monitoring and analytics tools when it comes to sentiment analysis. It analyzes brand sentiment shows trends, and has a cool feature called “image insights”. The feature identifies images associated with your brand’s logo in the same way that topics can be associated with your brand’s name. This means that when you upload your brand’s logo, the tool finds images on the web that include that logo.
3. Talkwalker
Talkwalker is another great tool for sentiment analysis. The tool claims to have the best available sentiment analysis technology, which enables it to detect sarcasm and other unobvious forms of negative mentions. It also monitors industry and customer satisfaction trends, the latter enabling you to more easily discover which features of your products are liked (and which are not).
4. Hootsuite Insights
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that focuses on scheduling and team management. However, Hootsuite Insights has some relevant features: it analyzes social media platforms to reveal your brand’s sentiment and the trends around your brand. You can later filter this information by location, language, and gender.
5. NCSU Tweet Sentiment Visualization App
NCSU Tweet Sentiment Visualization App is a sentiment analysis tool for Twitter. Twitter data can be highly indicative of broader brand reputation on social media, given that most Twitter users follow brands on Twitter, and there are tons of mentions of brands in tweets. The app is an online solution that helps businesses capture and analyze this data, showing the results of both sentiment and topic analysis.
6. Mention
Mention is a tried and tested social media monitoring app. Mention monitors brand mentions on major social networks, news sites, blogs, forums, and the web. Mention’s sentiment analysis is available in all plans – the tool sorts mentions into positive, negative, and neutral, making it easy for you to measure your brand’s reputation, see how it changes over time and what influences such shifts.
7. Social Searcher
Social Searcher monitors social mentions and the web – and it’s free for up to 100 keyword searches per day. The app also performs sentiment analysis for the mentions that it finds, while you can also upgrade to Premium Monitoring, which will increase the amount of keyword searches you can conduct. The tool monitors not only top social networks, but also more local and niche ones, such as Flickr, Dailymotion, Vimeo, and VK.
8. RapidMiner
RapidMiner is a cloud-based data mining tool. Similar to the other tools on this list, RapidMiner uses machine learning to perform analysis and reveal trending topics. But it can also be used for a lot more than that. The platform claims to be sophisticated enough for data scientists and simplified enough for the rest.
9. Lexalytics
Lexalytics is a business intelligence solution which analyzes different kinds of text. Lexalytics works with social comments, surveys, reviews, and any other text documents. In addition to sentiment analysis, the tool performs categorization, theme extraction, and intention detection, which can make it easier for users to see expanded context, and understand the relative advantages and disadvantages for their business.
10. Clarabridge
Clarabridge is a multi-faceted platform which includes customer experience management. Part of this solution is sentiment analysis. The tool’s sentiment analysis is very complex and takes into account grammar, context, industry, and source.
Wrap-up
Brand health calculation calls for a broad range of metrics, but measuring brand sentiment might be the most important one. What people say to their friends and family, what they share on social media, and what they post on personal blogs is what, eventually, leads to consumer action, and as such, it’s important to understand your brand reputation, what influences it, and how you can manage such to improve.
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This article first appeared in www.socialmediatoday.com
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