Providing customer service over social media comes with so many benefits, but you have to make sure your efforts result in a happy customer. To do that, your company can make use of the right type of analysis that can track emotional charge. Since sentiment analysis can improve customer service on your social media channels, we recommend regularly checking the results.
To recap our post that defined social sentiment in social media, social sentiment analyzes the emotion that is best portrayed in the contents of a comment or text. However, instead of suggesting if the user feels happiness or contempt, sentiment analysis categorizes it across a spectrum divided into positive, neutral, and negative sentiment.
These sentiment categories are defined in a pretty intuitive way. Neutral sentiment doesn’t have a strong positive or negative tone, or it uses both to a similar extent. Positive sentiment means that a post has uniquely positive tones, while negative sentiment indicates uniquely negative tones.
Why should I analyze social sentiment to learn more about my customer service on social media?
As previous marketing research shows, consumers take reviews from other consumers pretty seriously. What your customers have to say is the most important at the end of the day.
If a restaurant had a poor rating on Google Maps, chances are you wouldn’t go there since so many people didn’t like the service. There’s no sense in giving your money to a business that won’t deliver quality results. So how can you tell when things are going well for you?
It won’t be enough for you to check the data from native social media tools. Sure, your engagement rate might tell you that many people were interacting with your profile or content, but were they outraged or ecstatic? The only way to find that out is through social sentiment analysis. In the next section, we’ll go over the ways you can use sentiment analysis to improve customer service on social media.
How can I use social sentiment analysis for social media customer service?
Actually, sentiment analysis can come in handy in a variety of situations. We’ll give you a few examples of how social sentiment analysis can be used in marketing and PR on your social media profiles.
Any given comment on your posts could include:
- Customer’s feedback about products,
- Customer satisfaction with your service,
- Or how likely the customer is to promote your brand to others (hint: this is one way you can get more people involved in your brand).
For the purposes of this article, we picked public comments found on the Deciem Facebook Page. All of the users’ identifying information has been hidden to ensure their privacy.
Now, using Sotrender’s sentiment detection model, there is a strong case to be made that the last comment is negative since the model shows over 80% confidence (0 means a specific type of sentiment wasn’t detected, while a 1 indicates perfect confidence). We analyzed it and got the following results.
So by quickly recognizing the negative sentiment in a comment, you can prioritize what comments you should answer first. Allowing negative comments to stay without any intervention could look pretty bad for your potential new clients or existing ones.
Is there a faster way of analyzing social sentiment?
As for automatically checking hundreds of comments at once, there is an efficient way of doing so. At Sotrender, our social inbox allows you to integrate your Facebook page in order to interact with and analyze the communication between your brand and customers. Thanks to automatic sentiment analysis, you can see which comments contain negative, neutral, or positive sentiment without having to read through all of them in great detail.
Social sentiment of user comments in the Sotrender application
When it comes to CS, we know that you probably have multiple CS specialists answering all of those comments on your social media. One of the problems you might have is organizing which CS specialist should take care of which comments, but this could help you make the right call. You could take the best or most experienced specialists to handle negative feedback. What’s more, your marketing and sales departments could benefit from having brand ambassadors like your specialists who are great at interacting positively. To send them in the right direction, you’ll need a reliable filtration system.
Actually, we have that covered, too. The sentiment filters allow you to find any type of comment that you’re looking for. On top of that, if you or one of your team members had doubts about a specific user’s comment, then you can find it quickly and resolve it as a team.
However, if you want to have a more in-depth analysis performed across media, then we can prepare a more comprehensive report for you.
This is an example of one of the graphs that you could see with your own report. The report also includes information about comment sentiment change over time, often your CS specialists on Facebook responded with the three types of sentiment, and how quickly each CS specialist responded. You will get more information about what aspects of your CS performance can be improved, and this data isn’t available when you use native tools.
Can I see if sentiment analysis results improved over time?
I’m happy to let you know that there’s a report for that, and you barely have to do anything on your own. If you’ve been using Sotrender’s social inbox for a while, the app will have gathered data about your moderators’ and users’ activities on your Page. That means that it can tell you what has changed about the conversations under your posts.
This is just one type of result you could expect to see in the social inbox report. You can read more about what is included in the report in this article.
Analyze multiple comments and longer periods of time
If you want to effortlessly find the crucial moments or posts that affected users’ attitudes on your brand’s social media profile, then you will need sentiment analysis. Instead of going through potentially thousands of comments over the last quarter or year by yourself, you can have all of the comment sentiment statistics summarized automatically.
For example, you’ll be able to analyze historical data from the moment you enabled Sotrender’s social inbox. The report can include long periods of time that wouldn’t be possible to analyze without this type of method of gathering data. A quick glance over the last year will tell you when exactly your positive or negative sentiment was highest. That way, you will know what content could be risky (or even a PR nightmare) and what content will have more positive reactions.
Let’s take a look at how the sentiment of user comments changed over time for one profile.
As you can see, most of the time, the comments left on the profile were neutral last year. However, the number of negative and positive comments overlapped on a number of occasions. It’s in your best interest to check the posts you uploaded on those days to see what evoked such a reaction at the time. Were you asking for feedback, did you post about a new product, or was there a PR crisis because something went wrong? Find out and learn what you can improve in your communication.
Track sentiment and keep your customers happy
As you can see, social sentiment is more than just “are there unhappy people commenting on my posts”. Just because there’s negative feedback on a social media platform doesn’t mean that your potential customers will overlook it. By staying on top of what your customers have to say on your brand’s Page, you will find out what your brand is doing right and where you can improve.
You should treat social sentiment as a type of feedback from your users on social media. Remember, a PR crisis could occur at any time, and those can get out of hand without proper intervention and care.
There you have it, that’s all you need to know about how you can make use of sentiment analysis to improve customer service!
Want to learn more about how AI can be used for social media and marketing? Read more:
