Redditors use the platform in multiple ways, from news aggregation to soliciting and sharing honest opinions without a marketing agenda. You won’t find paid influencers here. Instead, anonymous users of all backgrounds and interests share opinions about their hobbies, jobs, purchases and more in threads or forums on specific topics called subreddits.

These subreddits often appear in search query results when users search for specific topics, even more so in recent months thanks to Google’s partnership with Reddit.

Reddit’s ever-growing source of answers and advice houses insights into your customer base that you won’t find anywhere else—and marketers are beginning to recognize the value of Reddit as a powerful social listening source. All you need to do is access those insights through Reddit social listening and contribute authentically to the community a subreddit has fostered to grow your brand.

Read on to discover how to tap the power of Reddit to find, understand and even participate in game-changing conversations for your brand.

What is Reddit social listening?

Reddit social listening is the process of tracking and analyzing mentions of your brand, industry, competitors and important keywords on Reddit. The benefits go beyond your marketing strategy, as social listening can increase org-wide success.

On Reddit, which has around 52 million daily active users and around 138,000 subreddits, there’s a conversation for any interest, and threads for nearly any brand. This makes Reddit social listening a supercharged feedback tool. It’s qualitative data without the fluff. International marketing manager at Sprout Social, Jocelyn Rodriguez-Piedra says, “Reddit goes beyond the curated feeds and filtered metrics to reveal the unfiltered authenticity of customer conversations. It is a goldmine of raw, honest data waiting to be unearthed.”

Reddit has gotten an SEO boost. According to Rodriguez-Piedra, “The Google and Reddit partnership essentially elevates Reddit as a more valuable source for consumer intelligence. Social listening on Reddit is a way to harvest and mine data that goes beyond the ‘what’ of consumer conversations and helps you see the ‘why.’”

Why is Reddit social listening important?

Redditors share candid opinions in a way they wouldn’t in a branded survey or even on social media accounts that have their real names attached. That’s why being a fly on the Reddit wall has many positives for your brand.

Brand discoverability

With Google indexing Reddit data, there’s a good chance a customer searching for your brand will pull up subreddit conversations in response to their query. This means paid backlinks and media placements aren’t the only way to optimize your SEO.

“Conversations on Reddit may now have a greater impact on brand discoverability and visibility,” Rodriguez-Piedra explains. “Social listening enables you to understand what kind of content resonates on Reddit and optimize your brand’s presence to be surfaced in relevant searches.”

Those posts boosting your brand’s Google presence are also full of useful information about your customer base, data that Rodriguez-Piedra says may be even more credible than other sources.

Richer insights

Google’s AI capabilities paired with Reddit social listening data can help marketers uncover deeper, more meaningful insights. The key, Rodriguez-Piedra says, is diving deep, not wide. “Reddit is not a one-size-fits-all platform with its intricate network of subreddits,” she says.

She recommends focusing on the granular details that show you the “why” behind customer sentiment and the choices they make. “You can identify patterns in frustrations, desires and emerging trends within highly specific communities,” she notes.

Reddit posts can spotlight the true emotional pulse of the customer and using AI tools that analyze sentiment can help connect the dots and highlight pain points. Rodrieguez-Piedra explains, “Social listening enables us to move beyond guesswork and intuition, truly providing a rich tapestry of customer sentiment in real-time.”

Sprout Social’s Social Listening tools leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze sentiment expressed in text. Having AI support like NLP can add context and color to the content you gather through social listening on Reddit.

Identify customer pain points

While a customer may let you know of issues they have during the purchase process, you often won’t get detailed feedback unless there’s a complaint. And customers who do respond to feedback surveys aren’t always detailed about their broader thoughts on your industry or competitors.

On niche subreddits related to your brand, however, conversations are full of these tidbits.

Complaints about your brand and products as well as competitors are an opportunity for you to identify and improve areas you may have previously overlooked. A single Reddit thread can provide intel to inform product development and even address problems before they escalate.

And—when done correctly—your brand can even join conversations on the platform.

Join conversations

Joining a conversation on Reddit is a true example of meeting your audience where they are. Reddit is also known for launching and nurturing trends and memes, and a single Reddit thread can become a news story all on its own. But there are some nuances to consider when responding to posts.

The number one rule, according to Rodriguez-Piedra: Don’t just drop in a sales pitch. “Offer valuable insights, answer questions, connect with people in the way the platform has encouraged users to show up—authentically. Become a resource, not a bullhorn.”

Customers don’t like being sold to on any social platform, but Reddit users really won’t take kindly to a brand account trying to upsell products in a thread. Instead, consider how you can leverage the people on your team to create value. Whether an “ask me anything” (AMA) on a relevant subreddit or assigning a specific person to browse Reddit and find customer care questions they can answer, always put authenticity at the center.

How to use Reddit social listening for your brand

Using social listening on Reddit requires a thoughtful strategy and an understanding of what to do with all the insights you’ll find. Here are suggestions on how to get started.

Find subreddits and keywords for your social listening strategy

The uncurated nature of Reddit offers many paths to follow when looking for relevant content. To find the right subreddits and keywords to track, turn to your overall marketing plan and what you already know about your target audience. Ask questions like:

• What hobbies do our customer personas have that relate to our brand?
• What’s their age range and location? What subreddits are popular with that age group or geographic location?
• What major keywords are we using in our SEO strategy?

Begin searching on Reddit for subreddits and threads based on those hobbies, ages, locations and keywords. Also search for your brand name, your competitors’ names and industry topics. You may even find a subreddit dedicated solely to your brand. But, keep in mind that a thread doesn’t need to mention your brand to contain valuable insight.

Once you find a relevant thread, look through the users participating in the conversation. See the post history and analyze the upvotes and downvotes on individual posts to see what content the broader community supports. This will give you additional ideas for topics and subreddits to check out.

Monitor and analyze Reddit conversations

Thousands of posts go live every hour, and Reddit conversations flow and change quickly. A machine-learning (ML) based, centralized tool like Sprout, with its Advanced Listening capability will help you keep up.

You can create customized queries based on your previous Reddit research, automatically sift through the noise and get straight to the relevant insights. Advanced Listening also helps you uncover notable patterns and analyze sentiment on a granular level.

Rodriguez-Piedra believes this is where the true value of Reddit social listening lies. “By leaning into data, we foster a culture of data-driven decision-making and, in return, transform the fleeting buzz of Reddit into sustainable brand success.”

Define a regular schedule for reviewing the data your social listening tools provide, and build a timeline for sharing with key stakeholders at your organization. Create guidelines for responding to key conversations you come across, keeping in mind that the window of time to respond may be short.

Engage and nurture Reddit prospects/customers found through listening

Marketing on Reddit requires a thoughtful approach. If you want to add to your customer pipeline via Reddit, Rodrgiuez-Piedra suggests becoming a Reddit regular.

“Immerse yourself in relevant subreddits. Actively participate in discussions, not for promotional purposes, but to genuinely connect and understand the community’s dynamics. What pulls at their heart strings?”, she says.

Community dynamics may not always be positive, and you’ll likely come across critiques and rants. But don’t shy away from the negativity. Instead, consider addressing the concerns directly and honestly. Taking part in Reddit conversations as a brand requires a commitment to following the community guidelines set, and transparency is always to your benefit.

The people have spoken—are you listening?

There’s a world of opportunity waiting for your brand on Reddit. With the right social listening tools, you can sift through thousands of posts and find content deeply relevant to your organization and target audience, whether it mentions your brand directly or not.

Social listening can open doors your marketing strategy couldn’t otherwise. You don’t need to be a full-fledged data scientist to open those doors, either. Get started with our guide to creating better social listening queries.

The post Reddit social listening: What it is and strategies for using it appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social listening has always been a powerful tool for brands that know how to wield it effectively. Even just one solid query can give a brand a rich, unbiased view of consumer sentiment. These insights build stronger messaging, campaigns, product lines—the opportunities are endless.

In a bygone era, tapping into this data couldn’t be done without countless training sessions on everything from advanced analytics to structured query language (SQL). Today, listening tools are more intuitive, making insights more accessible.

If your leadership team is bought in on social listening, the only thing standing between you and smarter social insights is improving your social listening query building skills. In this article, we’ll show you how to craft social listening queries that answer your burning questions on consumer preferences, sentiment and more.

• What is a social listening query
• Social listening queries and Boolean search
• How to create better social listening queries

What is a social listening query

A social listening query is a set of search parameters a user gives to a social listening tool to gather and analyze consumer data across a variety of social networks. These queries can include keywords, hashtags, cashtags, mentions, phrases and even emojis, depending on your tool of choice.

Social listening queries allow marketers to keep their finger on the pulse of what’s happening online. By tracking conversations, sentiment data and other relevant information, they provide insights into audience preferences and behaviors.

Social listening queries and Boolean search

Boolean search is a way of refining query results by combining keywords with search operators. These operators include “AND”, “OR” or “NOT”, along with several other character combinations, to allow users to tailor searches for specificity.

Many—but not all—social listening tools use a Boolean search query builder. If you choose a social listening tool with this particular setup, you’ll need to know the full roster of Boolean operators, along with the basics of search logic to create successful queries.

For example, if a marketer at Sprout Coffee Co. wanted to parse through mentions of their most recent seasonal beverage, here’s what that query might look like:

(“Sprout Coffee Co.” OR “Sprout Coffee”) AND (“Pumpkin Spice Latte” OR “PSL” or “Pumpkin Spice”)

With many tools, the more thorough your understanding of Boolean search, the more detailed you can be in your query creation.

If you don’t want to spend your spare time learning the basics of Boolean, don’t worry—you can still harness the power of social listening. Sprout’s Listening Query Builder is user-friendly and intuitive, so your team can create complex, multi-faceted queries in the same time it takes to schedule a post.

You can even use the Queries by AI Assist tool to strengthen your query as you build it. It will automatically suggest related keywords based on the keyword you initially provide, so you can get the insights you’re looking for even faster.

How to create better social listening queries

If you want to get the most out of your social listening tool, then you need to understand how to set up and maintain social listening queries. The truth is, query building is more about mindset than anything else. There’s no one way to do it—you just need to know how to ask the right questions.

The following tips will help you create queries that step up your social listening strategy.

Get clear on what will drive value for your business

You know the phrase, “there’s nothing more intimidating than a blank canvas”? Well, the same can be said about blank social listening query fields.

The most common hurdle people experience when getting started with social listening is knowing what to look for. Millions of conversations happen on social media every day. It’s only natural that it might cause some analysis paralysis.

The best way to break through this barrier is to get exceedingly clear on what information will drive the most value for your strategy, your team and your business. To achieve this clarity, ask the following questions:

• What are your marketing departments’ top priorities for this quarter and year?
• What are your business’ top priorities this quarter and year?
• What conversations could yield valuable insights for teams across your business?

Use the answers to these questions to inform a string of keywords that act as the foundation for your social listening query. This can take a lot of shapes. For example, a business concerned with reducing customer churn would benefit from a listening topic to spot trends in their customer experiences. A query with keywords related to their brand, specific product lines and common points of praise or concern can demystify what’s actually causing customers to leave.

Go beyond brand health

Your brand doesn’t have to be trending on social media for social listening to work. Smaller brands and businesses in crowded industries can benefit from a variety of social listening applications—you just have to think beyond brand health.

Social listening has a variety of use cases, like customer care, market research, competitor intel and more. You can still build valuable queries, even if your brand itself isn’t sparking enough discussion online to yield meaningful insights.

Sprout’s Social Listening tool offers a variety of Topic Templates to help users get started with query creation. These pre-built templates provide tips and examples for our five most popular Listening use cases: industry insights, competitive analysis, campaign analysis, event monitoring and of course, brand health.

Consider how you might use these templates to inspire new listening use cases.

Get inspiration from your audience

Use social listening to deepen your customer knowledge. Developing queries around topics that are trending with your audience can pull valuable voice of customer insights that support more tailored brand messaging. Plus, they can provide intel on where your brand fits within the interests, concerns and behaviors of your target audience.

For example, we often see healthcare organizations using social listening to better understand trending conversations and industry topics. A hospital system can create a “back to school” social listening query at the end of the summer and learn parents near them are concerned about how this will impact the spread of the flu and other viruses.

This little nugget of insight can inspire social strategy, out-of-home advertising, internal resource distribution—the opportunities are endless.

Refine your queries over time

A major misconception with social listening is that if you build a topic and it works, you can then set it and forget it. Here’s why that doesn’t work.

Conversations—whether about your brand or other points of interest—constantly evolve. If you return to a Listening Topic that hasn’t been refined in months, chances are you’re going to miss new developments in audience preferences, concerns and behaviors.

Remember: a tool can only be as smart as you allow it to be. If your query begins to pull irrelevant information, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work anymore. It just means you need to go back and add keyword exclusions and/or additions. This refinement is necessary and normal. It should be a standard part of your listening workflow.

Sprout’s Listening Topic Preview feature is a great way to pressure test a query update before making an entirely new Topic. When you click Preview in the Query Builder, you’ll see a preview of results from X (formerly known as Twitter). If the results feel relevant and useful, you can click Start Listening, and the rest of your selected networks will get pulled in. If not, keep tweaking your query until you surface the right information.

Build better social listening queries with Sprout Social

When you work in social, time is of the essence. The longer it takes to set up a social listening query, the less time you have to capitalize on the insights your query will provide.

Sprout’s social listening solution is intuitively designed and powered by AI technology, so you can take charge of your own success quickly. With Sprout, you don’t need to wait on a data scientist for access to business intelligence from social conversations happening all over the world. Sign up for a demo today to learn more about how Sprout can help you drive smarter, faster business impact from social.

Schedule a Demo Today

The post How to create better social listening queries appeared first on Sprout Social.

Today’s customers are sharing feedback in new ways. Often, that feedback isn’t given directly to the company. Gathering as much insight as possible from the feedback you have is crucial. Without sentiment analysis, you only capture a small part of the big picture.

Sentiment analysis marketing is an AI-powered technique that decodes the nuanced emotions and opinions your customers express online, producing insights about what truly drives your target audience.

In this blog, you’ll learn how to amplify the impact of your marketing strategy using sentiment analysis.

Table of contents:

• What is sentiment analysis marketing?
• Role of sentiment analysis in marketing
• 8 applications of sentiment analysis in marketing
• Top sentiment analysis marketing tools

What is sentiment analysis marketing?

Sentiment analysis in marketing is the process of analyzing and understanding the emotions, attitudes and opinions expressed by customers or potential customers toward a brand, product, service or marketing campaign. This analysis is conducted using natural language processing (NLP) techniques on digital text data from sources like the following:

• Social media
• Customer reviews
• Articles
• Surveys
• Online forums
• Customer service interactions

Sentiment analysis classifies each piece of text as positive, neutral or negative.

Positive sentiment reveals what customers like about you and often highlights areas of opportunity. Negative sentiment catches risks and identifies aspects of the customer experience that could use improvement. Neutral sentiment identifies a lack of strong positive or negative emotions in a piece of text.

Role of sentiment analysis in marketing

Sentiment analysis enables marketers to craft campaigns tailored to how their audience actually thinks and feels. It takes the guesswork out of catering to your ideal customer, making it easier to develop strategies that resonate and drive engagement.

How sentiment analysis works

Sentiment analysis tools digest large volumes of text and produce insights into your customers’ experiences, thoughts and feelings. Data is collected from online sources like social media, review sites and forums. That text then undergoes a preprocessing phase to remove noise, irrelevant information and formatting inconsistencies. This may involve tokenization, lowercasing, removing stop words and stemming or lemmatization.

Once the data is clean and structured, machine learning algorithms or deep learning models extract words, phrases or n-grams that represent the content and context of the text, classifying the sentiment of each piece as positive, negative or neutral. They use a standardized scoring system to rate sentiment with minimal bias, making the resulting insights more accurate and trustworthy. From there, brands use the insights to optimize marketing initiatives.

8 applications of sentiment analysis in marketing

Sentiment analysis is like giving your customers a seat at the table, where you can get their honest, unfiltered feedback. Understanding how customers feel about a subject at any given moment helps you design stronger conversion paths, make better budgeting decisions and strengthen customer relationships.

To get you started, here are some of the most impactful sentiment analysis applications:

Social media listening

Use sentiment analysis with social media listening to interpret what people are saying about your brand, product or niche on social networks.

Your sentiment analysis tool will digest social posts and comments to calculate score based on the emotions, opinions and attitudes conveyed. This standardizes the process of determining how customers perceive your brand or other topics on social media.

Marketers can implement these insights into their social media strategy by crafting campaigns with customer sentiment in mind. Incorporating the target customers’ opinions and emotions shows that you’re listening and care about your audience. This can lead to deeper connections and engagement through more personalized campaigns.

Brand insights

Sentiment analysis also reveals opportunities for improving products, services and the customer experience.

Monitoring sentiment in real time to identify negative sentiment and protect the brand’s reputation in times of crisis.

Sentiment analysis can also uncover compelling stories from customer feedback data. You can use these authentic customer stories to create powerful brand narratives that speak directly to your customers’ needs.

Competitive analysis

Analyzing a competitor’s customer sentiment provides valuable insights into their brand perception, market share and market behavior, giving you a competitive advantage.

These insights are useful for benchmarking your performance, improving your audience engagement and identifying opportunities for differentiation.

Opinion mining

Opinion mining uses sentiment analysis to examine customer feelings, intentions and opinions on a sliding scale. Instead of scoring sentiment as positive, negative or neutral, opinion mining ranks a customer’s specific emotion. For example, a user’s social media comment could be ranked between “very happy” and “very unhappy”.

Because opinion mining explores the underlying emotions driving customer behavior,
you can use it to enhance the quality of market research, marketing campaigns, risk mitigation and customer service.

Voice of customer (VoC)

VoC represents feedback across the customer journey. Brands use VoC programs to design products and marketing strategies based on the wants and needs of their target customers. Around 83% of U.S. consumers classify good customer service as an important or critically important driver of brand loyalty. Leveraging sentiment analysis for VoC analysis enables you to optimize customer experiences and drive business growth.

Sentiment analysis tools analyze customer sentiment from online reviews, surveys, CRM notes and other sources in real-time. This allows you to identify a problem or opportunity and then quickly adapt marketing strategies to meet the needs and preferences of your customers. Staying aligned with customer expectations fosters stronger relationships and drives customer loyalty.

Market research

There are several ways to apply sentiment analysis to market research. One example is market sentiment monitoring, which uses sentiment analysis to monitor overall sentiment and public opinion on industry trends, events and issues.

Market researchers can use the sentiment insights gathered from news articles, social media conversions and online discussions to learn about the market dynamics, sentiment and potential shifts in consumer behavior. They can also use aspect-based sentiment analysis to research which aspect of a service, topic or product is preferred over others and why, all from open-ended feedback.

Sentiment analysis can also predict shifts in customer preferences and market trends by identifying patterns and correlations in historical sentiment data.

You can also use sentiment analysis to review open-ended target market surveys and analyze quantitative data on the emotions and opinions of survey respondents at scale.

Influencer prospecting

Sentiment analysis helps marketers find influencers whose sentiments align with the brand’s objectives. Identifying influencers who resonate strongly with your brand leads to more impactful and authentic collaborations.

Start by finding influencers who often post using your target keywords, then use sentiment analysis to assess how their audience feels about the keywords. The ideal influencer’s audience will have positive feelings toward your niche topics.

Campaign performance analysis

Sentiment analysis helps marketers analyze and optimize campaign performances.

Assess campaign performance in real time by tracking customer sentiment and analyzing the reasons why a campaign may succeed or fail. Try identifying which regions and demographics responded positively and negatively, then find out how you can optimize future campaigns to improve sentiment for each customer segment.

Top sentiment analysis marketing tools

Manually assessing customer sentiment would require hours—even days—of scraping together brand mentions, customer service interactions, online discussions and other relevant content, and then giving each piece of content a sentiment score, one at a time. On top of the time it would take, the inconsistencies and human bias would make the results unreliable.

Luckily, there are plenty of advanced tools and technologies available for decoding a customer’s emotions and opinions. Here are some sentiment analysis marketing tools you can use to produce actionable insights, optimize marketing campaigns and elevate your customer experiences.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management platform equipped with sentiment analysis features that help marketers understand their customers’ wants and needs. Sprout uses AI-driven technology to enable high-volume data ingestion at scale. Our listening solution processes up to 50,000 posts per second and an average of 600 million messages every day, so you can zero in on the high-impact conversations driving the perception of your brand.

Sprout’s sentiment analysis detects customer sentiment in complex sentences with emojis and grammatical inconsistencies, providing an accurate picture of how customers feel. Brands can track these insights over time, while also filtering individual posts by sentiment to triage high-priority customer service requests.

You don’t need to be a Boolean search expert to use our powerful Listening tool. The Queries by AI Assist feature generates suggestions that refine your query based on your provided keywords.

And because Sprout’s sentiment analysis tool is part of a full suite of social media marketing solutions, it’s that much easier to apply sentiment analysis across your entire marketing strategy. With Sprout, you can action insights directly into your social strategy within the platform, plus generate insights and reports that can be shared across departments to impact the larger business.

Key features:

• Customer sentiment: Explore customer feelings and opinions on specific topics, trends, products, experiences and more
• Social listening: Build sophisticated listening queries that capture audience insights on your brand, marketing campaigns, competitors and more
• AI-powered filters and intelligent search queries: Use AI and automation to adjust listening query filters for more thorough, actionable results
• Streamlined data analysis: Automatically sift through billions of data points to uncover trends, insights and key learnings
• Crisis management: Monitor evolving conversations with custom crisis alerts and granular sentiment analysis
• Competitive analysis: Identify industry gaps, track share of voice (SOV) and understand how customers perceive your competitors
• Influencer prospecting: Identify influencers and thought leaders based on post sentiment and impact

Reputation

Reputation’s customer insights tools break down and analyze customer sentiment to reveal trending topics in real time. They use advanced text analytics to determine the subject matter and sentiment of a piece of content and display insights in a dashboard sorted by topic and theme.

Use Reputation to understand customer sentiment, highlight your brand’s strengths and weaknesses, improve your customer experience and identify and mitigate risks critical to your brand.

Key features:

• Competitive reporting: Understand customer sentiment toward competitors
• Experience insights: Measure how customers feel about your customer experience
• Reputation score: Get a real-time calculation that measures how customers perceive your brand
• Sentiment maps: Analyze the emotions expressed in comments and reviews.
• Automatic feedback categorization: Automatically group customer feedback into categories unique to your industry

Monkeylearn

Monkeylearn’s free sentiment analyzer allows marketers to quickly detect emotions in text data. Paste your text into the box to receive a sentiment rating. The tool will tell you whether the sentiment is positive, negative or neutral with a confidence percentage.

Key features:

• Sentiment analysis: Identify customer sentiment for a piece of text as positive, negative or neutral
• Confidence rating: Receive a confidence rating for each sentiment

Lexalytics

Lexalytics uses text deconstruction and NLP to evaluate the sentiment of a piece of text. The tool uses categorization, named entity recognition, intention detection and other techniques. This produces structured conclusions that help marketers conduct historical and predictive analytics.

This tool is ideal for transforming large amounts of social media content into structured insights that help marketers assess conversations about products, brands, people and services.

Key features:

• Sentiment analysis and rating: Gather and rate customer sentiment insights
• Document categorization: Categorize customer reviews, support tickets and other documents using NLP and machine learning
• Entity extraction: Automatically pull proper nouns from text and determine their sentiment from the document
• Intention detection: Understand the intention of each piece of customer feedback
• Native language support in 29 languages: Analyze customer feedback in 29 languages

Talkwalker

Talkwalker’s AI-powered sentiment analysis helps marketers understand what customers want and safeguard their brand’s reputation. This tool adds sentiment information to all monitoring results, from news articles and social media posts to survey responses. It flags high-risk posts in real time, helping you safeguard your brand’s reputation through rapid action.

The tool also offers sentiment indicators for product features, helping you compare key product characteristics to find out which features your audience loves, which need improvement and ways you can stay ahead of the market.

Key features:

• Sentiment analysis: Use AI-powered sentiment analysis to analyze customer feedback with an accuracy of 90%
• Competitive intelligence: Understand how customers perceive your competitors
• Content ideation: Brainstorm content ideas based on customer sentiment
• Real-time trend identification: Identify current trends that resonate with your customers

Optimize your marketing strategy with sentiment analysis

Customer feedback is changing. Customers won’t tell you directly when they’ve had a bad experience. They’d rather take to social media or review sites to talk about it. This makes gathering feedback and analyzing their sentiment even more important. This is where sentiment analysis tools prove to be an invaluable resource. They help you automatically extract rich customer insights from a variety of sources to drive meaningful improvements to your products, marketing campaigns, brand reputation and more.

To make the most of it, you need the right tool. We shared a few here, but check out our extended list of sentiment analysis tools to further research the best options on the market.

The post The role of sentiment analysis in marketing appeared first on Sprout Social.

Of these conversations, less than half were positive. A proof point that illustrates what many social marketers already know: Presidential elections make social media a hard place to navigate, even if your brand isn’t inherently political. In a typical year, running social media for a brand account is complex. But during a year like this, the complexity and risk multiply tenfold.

To make it through this year unscathed, brands should consider what audiences actually expect from them, and have a plan in place to protect their brand safety.

Will brands sit this one out?

The dawn of social media activism—from #OccupyWallStreet to #ArabSpring to the 2016 US presidential election—changed people’s expectations of brands. Consumers started demanding that apolitical businesses take on a new level of corporate responsibility. According to Harvard Business Review, “Business has become enmeshed with politics and social issues…By 2018, CEO activism was seen as the ‘new normal.’”

In 2020, we saw brands speaking out more in response to the onset of the COVID pandemic, worldwide Black Lives Matter protests and growing concerns about climate change. So much so that brand activism on social became the expectation, and brands who remained silent on certain issues were heavily criticized.

But in the last few years, consumer demands have begun to shift again.

A few years ago, brands speaking out on issues was non-negotiable. But as The 2023 Sprout Social Index™ points out, today only 25% of consumers believe brands must speak out on causes and news that align with their values to be memorable. In fact, only 21% of consumers follow brands on social because their mission or values align. With skepticism around performative activism on the rise, audiences value brands that prioritize providing excellent service over lackluster public statements.

And it seems brands are growing weary of taking hard stances on political issues for fear that it could alienate members of their audience, invite a tidal wave of hate and trolling, or backfire in the future. When doing research for this article, no brands were willing to speak about their approach to this year’s election—suggesting brands are tired of being burnt by the harsh political limelight.

Some brands, like nonprofits and political associations, will inevitably need to be present in social media conversations about controversial topics. But even they will be selective about how they engage to reach their goals on social. They must be strategic in order to increase awareness, drive engagement and emerge from election season a thought leader. The key is being quick to the draw when it comes to sharing their unique POV on timely topics, and understanding which issues are important to their community. For example, Gen Z voters are particularly interested in mental health, while Gen X is more concerned about employment opportunities.

Though it’s still early, it seems likely that brands will be far less involved in this year’s US presidential election than in 2016, and instead focus on audience engagement and protecting their brand image.

The influencer loophole

While most brands might shy away from sharing explicit statements about their political affiliation, there might be one way they can still demonstrate their values: influencer marketing. Like Reformation’s latest campaign with Monica Lewinsky and Vote.org, some brands will rely on influencers and celebrities to communicate their brand values.

Interestingly, the Reformation campaign focuses most heavily on their new line of women’s tailored workwear and Lewinsky’s political icon status. Even the political message of the campaign—“get out and vote”—strikes a much less political tone than brand activations in 2020.

When looking for the right influencers to work with, consider how their political views will land with your target audience and reflect on your brand. Even if your influencer campaigns are apolitical, your brand will be associated with the influencers’ values. Which can work to your advantage.

As Greg Rokisky, Social Media Strategist at Sprout Social puts it, “When partnering with influencers and creators, the Sprout team examines potential partners’ overall content and presence to ensure they align with our core values. That doesn’t mean uniformity in thought or that we shy away from bold opinions…At the end of the day, these partnerships are meant to create meaningful connections and add value to our community.”

So, if you take the “influencer loophole” in your approach to this year’s election, make sure you do it thoughtfully, authentically and with your brand’s larger goals in mind. Rokisky goes on, “We know creators, like anyone, have their own views and the right to express them. Our focus is on the content that directly relates to our brand, products and the positive impact we hope to create for our current and potential customers and businesses everywhere.”

Social listening is critical to assessing brand health

Whether brands go all-in on an election strategy or dial it back, one thing is true: Businesses have far less control over their brand narrative in the age of social—and social media during an election year is even less predictable.

That’s why leaders from across the business should ask their social team for regular updates on brand health during a presidential election. With social listening tools, they can dive into the sentiment and scope of political topics on social, and monitor for impending crises.

For example, Sprout relies on listening even more in election years. “During the election we will use social listening to tune into conversations that could impact our brand health and image. We are more mindful of protecting our brand from a crisis during the election because tensions are running high, and it increases the risk for every brand online—even B2B SaaS brands,” says Olivia Jepson, Senior Social Media Strategist at Sprout Social.

Sentiment analysis is particularly helpful to gauge the tone of political conversations, and how they intersect with brand health and industry trends.

Social listening isn’t just relevant for this year’s upcoming US presidential election. It’s just as valuable to elections happening around the world. With 64 countries holding national elections this year, potential voters make up 49% of the world’s population. By using a Social Listening solution like Sprout’s, teams can set up queries that track millions of conversations happening worldwide to zero-in on key learnings in seconds and ensure they protect their brand globally.

What it takes for brands to “win” in this election season

Managing social in a presidential election year can feel uncomfortable and nerve-wracking. Like you’re walking on eggshells—one misstep away from your brand cracking under pressure.

But changing consumer preferences suggest many want brands to stay in their lane, and only speak about issues selectively. While this takes some of the heat off of brands, the risk is still high. Companies that want to emerge from election year relatively unscathed and with their goals achieved, need to take more care safeguarding their brand.

Looking for help maximizing your brand protection strategy this election year? Check out our communications plan templates and webinar.

The post Navigating social media marketing in an election year appeared first on Sprout Social.

In total, they have 64 social media accounts and hundreds of thousands of followers across platforms. I was surprised to learn the team behind Nelnet’s vast social presence is only a team of two (who work with customer care and marketing groups across the company).

I interviewed Dan Levey, Social Media Manager and Team Lead at Nelnet, to learn how his “small and scrappy team” balances their limited resources across a wide range of business lines. He explained the relationship building and resource prioritization required to manage multiple accounts effectively. Keep reading for his tips to allocate social resources—especially for nimble teams with bandwidth constraints.

The dream team: How social team structures can support product portfolio marketing

According to Dan, “The Nelnet social team sits on the corporate marketing org, and functions like an in-house agency for Nelnet’s various brands—each with different goals and identities on social.”

Dan leads the team strategy by consulting on strategy, best practices, and interpreting key campaign metrics and trends. The Social Media Specialist who reports to Dan handles scheduling, pulling metrics and monitoring conversations across social channels. Together, the duo conducts social listening research and generates monthly reports for relevant business lines and internal teams. The team also partners on content production with other in-house creatives, like copywriters, graphic designers, project managers and video producers, and consults the legal and compliance team to remain compliant with industry rules and regulations.

To ease collaboration with each of the business lines they serve, Dan created a presentation within his first few months at Nelnet that explains the breadth of the social team’s capabilities and the different skills they can offer each business. “We are here to educate the partners on best practices and what goes into social media management and strategy,” Dan said. “The big misconception about social is that it’s easy. It’s so much more than posting. It’s A/B testing, reporting, interacting with audience members and more.”

He shares the presentation with each business marketing leader, who mix and match the services they need á la carte. Dan explains, “The presentation I created lists each of our capabilities, including creating content, strategy, end-to-end production, graphics, social listening, reporting and regular check-in meetings. Each of our business lines needs different things.”

Make it your own: Whether your social team functions like an in-house agency or uses a center of excellence model, it’s critical that they have open lines of communication with each brand or business line. Give social team leaders a seat at the table, and encourage them to build relationships and educate other leaders about what goes into managing (and maximizing) social.

Accomplishing each brand’s goals requires having hard conversations

Managing multiple brand accounts does not mean copying and pasting your approach to social from one brand to another. Every brand or business line has their own objectives and audiences.

As Dan explains, “Each business line wants to accomplish different things. For example, some are more focused on organic growth, while others are more invested in paid campaigns.” It’s up to Dan, his team and the business lines to decide where they can spend their time and resources, and consider how to prioritize projects with company-wide goals in mind.

Dan’s team adapts their approach to social strategy accordingly, while also being honest with stakeholders about what’s feasible for a small team. Dan often pushes back in conversations with partners by asking, “What goal are you trying to accomplish? What’s the greater purpose of this proposed project?”

The Nelnet social team has a comprehensive view of brand performance and company-wide strategy, which gives them a unique and valuable perspective. Dan is tasked with keeping each business line grounded in their own goals and the business’ vision.

He brings valuable insights to these conversations with the help of Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox and Social Listening solution. As Dan says, “We use Sprout’s Automated Rules and Social Listening tools to give us alerts on brand sentiment, competitive analysis and customer satisfaction.”

Make it your own: Trust social team leaders when they say it’s impossible to achieve every goal. Be their champion when they ruthlessly prioritize projects. Use the performance intel they share to shape your company’s goals, and keep them in the loop of the larger business strategy.

Ensure all of your brands get the right level of support

One of the most challenging things the Nelnet social team faces is the fear of making any of the internal partners they work with feel like other business lines are being prioritized over them. As Dan puts it, “How do we make every business line feel like they’re getting the right amount of support?”

This is especially challenging when they need to shift resources from one product line to another—whether it’s because corporate goals changed or a campaign is falling short of expectations. In those moments, Dan relies on the trust and relationships he’s built with stakeholders. In his words, he has a “heart-to-heart” with internal partners to let them know they need to pull back social team resources.

Sometimes, the conversations result in business leaders being more invested in their social strategy, and signing their own teams up to take a more active role in social management. Through compromises like these, the social team is able to free up bandwidth and nurture more meaningful stakeholder collaboration.

Make it your own: In the face of tight budgets and plateaued headcount, make sure your org has the right tools to do more with less. With collaborative enterprise social media software, the social team and other departments can co-manage social together—ensuring no brands slips through the cracks and there are enough resources to go around.

Set all your brands up for success on social media

Dan sums up his approach to managing different internal clients like this: “Be realistic about what you can accomplish. Set clear expectations that are tied to their goals. Over communicate.”

When your social team faces an overwhelming amount of requests from your many brands, remind them to seek simplicity and go back to the basics of building relationships. Advise them to be honest, accountable and transparent.

To help them more easily share results from social across your company, use our social media scorecard templates to give leaders a digestible view of their brand’s (and your company’s overall) health and strategy.

The post Balancing social resources across multiple business lines appeared first on Sprout Social.

Skillful brand storytelling requires using insights about your audience so you can connect with them, iterate your storytelling and, ultimately, impact your marketing strategy and brand reputation.

You can use feedback from your audience on social media to build brand loyalty and make your brand’s story unforgettable. In this article we’ll cover why a brand story is so important and show you how to create a strong narrative that resonates. And we’ll share four brand storytelling examples to inspire you.

What is brand storytelling?

Have you ever felt so connected to a brand that using their product or service made you feel like the person you aspire to be? That’s successful brand storytelling.

At its core, brand storytelling establishes emotional connections with people based on the values you share with them and their needs, desires and aspirations. Innovative brand stories convey empathy, create experiences and demand urgency.

“Telling a brand’s story begins with finding its truth. Whether in social or broadcast or any medium in between, consumers will seek out brands that feel authentic to both their values and what they want from a product or company. Once we’ve mined that truth we then convert it into an outward-facing message that can be disseminated and interpreted in every channel to every audience.”

— Peter Levin, Creative Director at Finn Partners

Your brand’s story impacts your entire public relations strategy—from the way your executives should sound or respond to a crisis to how you build your social media presence. Your story should be a throughline across channels.

Why do you need a brand story?

There are several benefits of having a brand story. An effective brand story will connect you to your target consumers, support your social media marketing efforts and inspire your customers to take action.

A brand story connects you to your customers

Customer care goes beyond fulfilling support inquiries and answering questions before people make a purchase—it’s about nurturing an emotional connection with customers and fostering loyalty. A brand story enables you to shed light on these empathetic customer touch points and merchandizes your brand’s values.

Storytelling is a core element of social media marketing

Brand storytelling is a cornerstone of social media marketing strategy. Every post on Instagram or video on TikTok or YouTube Shorts ladder up to your brand narrative. For example, if you were to post a behind-the-scenes look at how your brand sources materials on social media, that’s a part of your brand story.

Brand stories inspire action

Effective brand storytelling not only evokes an emotional connection, but it ignites your target audience to interact with your brand. Whether it’s purchasing a new product or becoming an advocate, authentic brand storytelling can inspire you to take action.

How to create a strong brand story

Where should you start when creating your brand’s story? Here are six steps to follow to help your story make an impact.

Start with your customer

To craft a brand story that’s compelling, you’ll need to define and consider your target audience. Use buyer personas or archetypes that embody the traits of your target audience. Think of your customers as the protagonist of your story. What problems do they face? What are their wants and needs? What are their behaviors and interests?

Through user surveys and research like social listening, you can uncover more about your customer and shape a stronger brand story.

Use narrative techniques

People are drawn to stories. The foundation of good brand stories is the same as your favorite movies, shows and books. Characters. Settings. Conflict. Climax. Resolution. By incorporating these five essential elements into your brand’s story, you make it possible to build emotional connections with your audience. And when you emotionally connect with them, you increase brand recall and transform your audience into brand evangelists.

Have a clear purpose

Your brand’s story needs to have a defined purpose so you can guide the narrative in the right direction. Try to narrow down the purpose of your story into one or two sentences. What is your brand trying to accomplish? For example, an organic personal care brand may want to help people embrace self-care through eco-friendly products.

Lean into authenticity

The most compelling stories glow with authenticity. Avoid creating stories for the sake of jumping on a trend. Instead, stay true to your brand’s identity when telling your story. Lean into refining your brand voice and stay true to it. Don’t feel pressured to use colloquial language or internet slang, unless it makes sense for your brand. Use your brand’s legacy, aspirations and values as your north star.

Patagonia is a great example of a brand leaning into authenticity. Some of their values include quality, integrity, justice and environmentalism.

Collaborate with your audience

It’s not just your team that needs to align on your story. Today, brand identities aren’t created in an incubator. Instead, creators, loyal fans and marketers work together to co-create a brand’s essence. To tell brand stories that resonate with your audience, you need to get their perspective. Social media is where you can find it.

Keep brand storytelling consistent

Maintain consistent storytelling to stay connected with your audience. Your audience should feel like they know what to expect from your brand. If your messaging and brand voice isn’t cohesive or consistent, your brand story won’t be as strong.

Tell a brand story that resonates

On social media, people tell brands exactly what they want. They share their thoughts, feelings and opinions about brands, products, current events and more. Listen to them first, develop your story second.

Why? Because they want to know your brand empathizes with their needs and aligns with their values. According to The Sprout Social Index™, transparency about business practices and values is ranked as the second type of content consumers say they don’t see enough of on social media.

“If you can get a pulse from your audience in the comments section, DMs or via AMA, that qualitative data can help inform creative and content strategies, your editorial calendar and even your larger marketing strategy. It’s an awesome focus group at your disposal 24/7 that can help you refine your brand story on social and beyond.”

– Alex Suazo, VP Digital Marketing & Social at Finn Partners

Let’s dive into the specific aspects of social media that help brands interact with their audience and uncover voice of customer (VoC) data.

Comments

The easiest way to access your customers’ feedback is by monitoring your comments section and mentions. They’ll let you know what they love about their experience with you.

For example, Cava posted a response video on TikTok about one of their most commented menu items: roasted sweet potatoes. In the video, the restaurant chain shares that they brought back the highly requested menu item and showed how they’re prepared. Cava’s seasonally sourced ingredients and in-house preparations are a key part of their brand story and customer experience. Fans were quick to sound off in the comments to share their love for the brand’s sweet potatoes, among other favorites.

On the other hand, when customers experience a roadblock in their journey with you, they’ll let you know by mentioning you or commenting on your posts. Whether they have a customer care concern or disagree with your approach to social media activism, consider negative feedback a learning opportunity. Use it as data to help shape your future brand storytelling.

Polls

When you want to know your audience’s perspective, don’t be afraid to ask. Creating interactive polls on social platforms is a great way to get hot takes on industry-specific debates or product preferences. Polls are a low-lift way to build an engaged community that’s more likely to provide their opinions in the future.

It’s important to note your poll should be appropriate for your followers. Consider what’s in it for them and why they’d want to participate. For example, could they learn something about industry best practices? Do they feel like they have a voice in your company’s stance on an issue?

Monitoring engagement

It’s easy to miss social media engagements, especially when your social team monitors multiple accounts and channels. It’s further complicated when posts only mention your brand by a variation of your name or shout out a product rather than reaching out to you directly. Social media monitoring tools make it easier to catch these instances.

Sprout’s Smart Inbox unifies all social channels into a single stream so your team can efficiently respond to untagged mentions of your brand keywords and hashtags from all channels in one place—even if your brand isn’t tagged. The Smart Inbox also allows you to see incoming messages, comments and mentions, so you never miss a detail that could shape your brand story.

How social listening can help boost brand storytelling

While monitoring tells you what people are saying, listening tells you why they’re saying it. With social listening, you can better understand your audience and improve your brand’s story by accessing the full spectrum of conversations around your industry, brand and competitors.

You get a window into the candid thoughts and feelings of an audience to illuminate trends, uncover patterns and gauge emotional response around any topic.

“Listening helps brands stay relevant. Without listening, you have to dig through a sea of social messages or conduct surveys and focus groups. Listening streamlines that process and ensures brands can keep up with the speed of the social trend cycle.”

— Kristin Johnson, former VP of Content and Communications at Sprout Social

Here are some ways you can use social listening to boost your online reputation and create a new, unique brand story.

Build stronger relationships

If you’re feeling out of touch with your audience, the first step is to discover opportunities to build stronger relationships with your community.

Ask yourself:

• How do our customers feel about us?
• What makes customers want to share about our brand?
• Is our campaign resonating? Why or why not?

In Sprout’s Listening tool, you can review sentiment trends related to your brand. For example, note how positive and negative feelings have evolved over time. Consider how sentiment aligns with your ongoing campaigns, PR efforts or other current events.

Improve your products or services

In many cases, creating a new brand story includes improving products or services. Use customer feedback on social media to refine your product development or service experience.

Ask yourself:

• Why do people like or dislike our brand and products or services?
• How do our products or services align with our customers’ values?
• How do our customers respond to the stories around our products or services?

Sprout’s Listening tool allows you to monitor keywords related to your products. This makes it possible to identify new trends that can help shape your product and service improvements and launches.

Join industry conversations

Innovative brands on social don’t miss a chance to join—and even start—conversations. To make sure you’re in the know, it’s important to be aware of where and why conversations are taking place.

Ask yourself:

• Why are certain hashtags and discussions trending in our industry?
• Why is our audience responding to an event or trend?
• What are people saying about our competitors (and their products or services)?

It’s natural to have a fear of missing out on trending conversations. In Sprout’s Listening tool, you can add themes related to trends and events relevant to your brand’s story to determine how they resonate with your audience. You can also visualize how your brand stacks up against your competitors by comparing share of voice and volume.

Authentic brand storytelling examples that connect with audiences

So, what does it look like to use social media data to tell compelling brand stories? Here are a few examples of brands leading the way.

Calm

The story: Health and happiness in our daily lives starts with meditation, mindfulness and better sleep.

Calm is an app created to help guide users through meditations, soundscapes and mindfulness exercises. With Calm, mental health and wellness feel less complicated. They reinforce why meditation is an important tool and how their app makes it easier.

Calm not only relies on feedback from social media to refine the user experience of their app, but also to keep a pulse on the direction of mental health and wellness trends.

Nuuly

The story: Rented and thrifted clothing is eco-friendly and stylish—while also saving you money.

Nuuly is a retail brand that offers a clothing rental program and thrifted merchandise. They make on-trend, high-quality styles available to everyone. Nuuly customers take pride in using the brand because it’s sustainable, financially sound and exceptional caliber.

Nuuly uses social insights to stay current on en vogue style, and make sure they’re in alignment with their customers’ values and needs. They also use social monitoring to respond to and research their audience. For example, Nuuly linked to their formal dresses page after a customer recommended using their site to find an affordable black tie dress:

Greenpeace UK

The story: We need to take immediate and radical action to fight climate change.

Greenpeace UK is a branch of Greenpeace, a global campaigning network dedicated to protecting the planet. On social media, Greenpeace UK uses visual imagery to convey the truth of the destruction to the planet, while also providing hope and inspiration.

For example, they shared a trailer for Forsaken, a film installation highlighting the life of Immortal Jellyfish and their mass extinction on Earth:

In the thread, Greenpeace UK explains they’re supporting the film because it’s as a reminder of how humans can negatively impact oceans, but note it’s not too late to protect them:

Greenpeace UK also partners with local politicians and environmental activists to serve as ambassadors to help tell their story. For instance a conservationist advocated for their #BigPlasticCount campaign:

This aligns with Greenpeace UK’s approach: every good story needs good visuals and strong brand advocates.

Target

The story: America’s happy place.

Target is a store for everything. The Target brand has been around for over 100 years, but they constantly reinvent themselves to continue providing the best shopping experience for their customers.

Today, they partner with influencers like Tabitha Brown to offer trendy clothing, food, skincare and hair care products, electronics, toys and more. People choose Target when they want a bit of extra joy in their life—whether it’s from recreating online aesthetics at home or being delighted in store.

Target looks to social media to understand emerging trends, how they can infuse more joy into people’s experiences with their brand and what their next collaboration should look like.

Use social media to create an impactful brand story

Brand storytelling is an essential part of your overall marketing strategy. To tell better stories, you have to listen to what people are saying. That starts with social monitoring, but can’t stop there. Social listening is critical to understanding people’s experiences with your brand because the best storytellers are engaged listeners.

Looking to learn more about how you can grow and protect your brand? Download this corporate communication plan template—it guides you through creating a calendar roadmap with quarterly initiatives, crafting a distribution strategy and more.

The post Brand storytelling: Creating a story that resonates appeared first on Sprout Social.

Customer sentiment, brand perception and cultural trends can change in minutes. Yet, getting the most value from social business intelligence requires the ability to access and take action quickly. From understanding the pulse of social trends to fine-tuning your customer care strategy, or informing your go-to-market plans, social data should be leveraged in all parts of your business.

Check out our panel discussion with Alex Lewis, Sr. Social Strategist at Hollister & Gilly Hicks, Deandre Moore, Social & Brand Marketing Lead at Affirm, and Jazmin Griffith, Social Intelligence Consultant. We’ll discuss why social data is the missing link for brands to best connect with their audiences. Plus, Corporate Erin stops by!

You’ll walk away from this event with:

• Key takeaways from new research on social media marketer productivity
• Reasons why your brand should embrace social listening
• Examples of how brands leverage social data to inform social and business strategy

Your Speakers:

The post Building Data-Powered Social Strategies: Insights from Hollister, Affirm, and Consultant, Jazmin Griffith appeared first on Sprout Social.

To push your organization forward, you need to share social insights proactively and often. Use this social listening report template to demonstrate the value of your data and gain buy-in from your leadership team. This presentation-ready deck will help you tell a story with social listening insights by:

• Summarizing the key findings and overarching themes from Listening topics
• Comparing your brand’s share of voice to its’ top competitors
• Outlining trends in topic sentiment over time
• Sharing what key conversation drivers say about your brand and your industry

It’s time to take your impact beyond the marketing silo. Download this social listening report template to bring social data to the forefront of your business conversations today.

The post A Social Listening Report Template to Share Insights Across Your Org appeared first on Sprout Social.

Literally: The Sprout Social Index™ found 51% of consumers agree responding to customers on social media makes brands the most memorable. Despite popular belief, your online reputation isn’t something that’s totally beyond your control.

If you want more positive reviews and glowing praise from your customers, you need an actual reputation management strategy. In this guide, we’ll show you how to put together your own.

What is social media reputation management?

Social media reputation management refers to the process of monitoring social networks to shape and maintain a positive perception online. Along with monitoring social networks, it can include reviewing online reviews on channels like Yelp and Google Reviews. Building a social media reputation requires frequent observation because your audience’s perception of your brand fluctuates over time.

It involves posting content, responding to feedback, conducting performance audits and using social listening data to uncover how your audience views your brand. Overall, social media reputation management aims to build and nurture trustworthy, long-standing relationships with your audience.

Why do you need a social media reputation management strategy?

We get it: some businesses might be skeptical of why ratings, reviews and positive comments hold so much weight.

Because if you know that you’re doing good business, who cares what other people are saying?

And besides, it’s easier to put on blinders and ignore your haters than it is to face your critics head-on. However, consider the following trends that highlight the importance of managing social media reputation:

Consumers are increasingly dependent on third-party reviews

It’s not a stretch to say that businesses live and die based on customer feedback.

People overwhelmingly rely on reviews when it comes to purchasing decisions. A survey from BrightLocal shows 76% of consumers regularly read online reviews when browsing for local businesses. And 46% of consumers feel that online business reviews are as trustworthy as personal recommendations from friends or family.

These stats illustrate the power of reputation management. Customers view brands with more positive reviews and recommendations as genuine and credible.

There’s massive demand for customer feedback and consumers aren’t shy about delivering it. Want evidence? Look no further than the millions of users on sites like Yelp.

Or the hundreds of categories scattered around sites like G2, a peer-to-peer review site for business software.

Or the millions of reviews on Google Reviews and Trustpilot:

You can sing your own praises all day long, but consumers are on the hunt for authentic, third-party reviews for peace of mind. The more of ’em you have, the better.

Digital word-of-mouth is crucial to growing your audience

Data from The Sprout Social Index™ found 68% of consumers say they primarily follow brands on social media to stay informed about new products or services.

Like it or not, people talk. A lot. Your own customers can do some serious legwork by marketing on your behalf, granted they’re satisfied with your service.

The takeaway here? Digital word-of-mouth marketing remains powerful because more conversations around your brand on social media represent additional opportunities to win customers and followers.

Customers hold the reins when it comes to your social media reputation

This is perhaps the biggest challenge of social media reputation management. Social media is authentic and unfiltered. That’s why it’s a great place to discover products and customer feedback—people can pretty much say whatever they want, for better or worse.

As a business, this presents a distinct challenge. Just as satisfied customers are empowered to hype you up, you can’t control your worst critics. That said, you’re still responsible for what they say–responses to reviews and using feedback to improve your products and services are essential parts of your overall reputation management process.

A 5-step social media reputation management strategy for your business

Now that we’ve acknowledged how much brand reputation management matters, let’s talk about the proactive steps you can take to improve your own. The following five step strategy is fair game for businesses both big and small.

1. Determine where your online reputation currently stands

First things first: you need to figure out how people feel about your brand right now.

Are your customers happy and satisfied? Are you struggling with naysayers? Perhaps you’re somewhere in-between?

Digging into a combination of qualitative and quantitative data can help clue you in on where your reputation stands. This includes:

• Social media posts, comments and @-mentions from customers and competitors
• Online reviews and star ratings from third-party review sites
• Mentions from industry blogs or trade publications
• Feedback gathered from actual customers (think: emails, customer surveys, contact forms on your website)

The key here is to look at the ratio of positive versus negative comments. If your customer sentiment seems to err on the positive side, that’s good! If not, you have some work to do.

The health of your social media reputation can be difficult to quantify manually. That’s where a platform like Sprout Social that offers social media reputation management tools can help.

For example, our sentiment analysis features can take mentions and turn them into a meaningful, quantifiable metric that you can track.

You can use your sentiment analysis summary as a starting point which you can monitor or strive to improve. Our platform also highlights trends in your customer sentiment (think: positive versus negative and neutral comments) over time without you having to sort them out manually.

Beyond comments are those ever-so-important reviews. Creating an online review management strategy to address feedback on third-party sites will enable your brand to maintain a full view of your customers’ opinions.

Another key feature of Sprout is the ability to wrangle all of your reviews from social media and beyond in a single platform. This gives you a more comprehensive view of your social media reputation and what your customers have to say about you without having to bounce between platforms.

2. Track your company’s mentions (the good, bad and ugly)

Social media reputation management is an ongoing process.

Once you determine where your reputation stands, you need to set up your business to be able to respond to customers swiftly in the future.

This means setting up real-time notifications and listening for the following:

• Comments, tags and @-mentions of your business (e.g. @SproutSocial)
• Hashtag analytics including brand-specific hashtags (e.g. #SproutSocial or #SproutChat)
• Branded keywords (e.g. recognizing “Sprout Social” and “Sprout” as keywords across networks)

Having a pulse on these elements makes it easier to craft the appropriate best practices to follow when someone has a question, concern or reason to shout you out.

This once again highlights the benefit of using a platform like Sprout. With Sprout, you can consolidate all of your social messages and mentions in a single inbox. You can likewise share your various dashboard(s) among your teammates to cover more ground and speed up your social media response time.

Our Index data shows that 76% of consumers value how quickly a brand can respond to their needs. And over half (69%) expect responses from brands on social within 24 hours or less.

3. Be proactive and positive as you respond to your social mentions

Whether it’s a concern or a compliment, social mentions represent prime opportunities to make a positive impression on customers and improve your social media reputation.

Doing so comes down to having a strategy for social customer service. Some key tips for responding to customers include:

• Personalizing each reply rather than just using a generic one
• Always give yourself the last word by saying “thanks”
• Moving questions or concerns off of social media to avoid unnecessary conflict or back-and-forth

It might sound cheesy, but a positive, proactive attitude goes a long way in social media reputation management. This rings true whether it’s answering a customer question or simply responding to shout-outs like in the example below:

4. Take control of your company’s narrative (and make it positive)

As noted, the key challenge of social media reputation management is that online comments are pretty much a free-for-all.

Arguably the best approach to combat the negative is by encouraging your own positive praise.

And yes, there are ways to do so beyond begging (which you definitely shouldn’t do).

For example, you might consider publishing success stories and existing positive reviews from your satisfied customers. This can help highlight positive experiences to your social prospects who might not have checked out any third-party reviews yet.

Beyond customer comments, employee advocacy and mentions from your own team can also create more positive sentiment. Don’t be shy about re-posting your customers’ positive responses or shout-outs, either. This includes asking for permission to republish user-generated content to use in your future marketing.

5. Take action based on comments, criticism and analytics

Finally, consider the power of listening to what your customers have to say.

Maybe they’re glowing over your recent customer service initiatives. Perhaps they’re unhappy about recent pricing changes.

Either way, don’t just take those comments in stride. Instead, listen to such feedback and make changes to your business accordingly.

And yet again, this is where Sprout can help. Digging into your listening data, you can uncover specific terms that pop up in your customer conversations to help you understand what you’re doing right and where you can improve.

The same applies to your third-party ratings, reviews and mentions. Being a business today means having a thick skin, but it also means taking criticism where it’s due.

Based on all of the above, you can circle back to square one to understand how your reputation management efforts are paying off and whether you’re moving the needle in a positive direction.

Top social media reputation management tools

As we mentioned earlier, manually monitoring and reviewing customer feedback is time-consuming. Using a for business can make a huge difference. Here’s a quick round-up of five tools so you can find the best review management software for your brand:

Sprout Social

Choosing the best social media reputation management software will depend on your business’s unique needs, but Sprout Social integrates with many top review networks to fit various needs. These networks include Facebook Pages, Google Reviews, TripAdvisor, Yelp and Glassdoor, which are the most popular in terms of volume and reach. We also offer integrations for the app stores (Google Play and Apple App Store).

With the Reviews Overview report, view a summary of your customer feedback. It includes vital metrics like reply rate and review volume. The report is part of Sprout’s larger customer care solution. Sprout creates a seamless experience across channels by enabling users to monitor multiple conversations, all the while providing priority metrics and automated reports so you can ensure your social customer service strategy is effective and efficient.

Brand24

Brand24 is another helpful tool for social media reputation management. Users can create projects to track online conversations about your brand and industry peers. You can also explore by searching mentions by campaign, analyze sentiment and create reports.

Mention

Mention is a social media management tool that offers a variety of features you can use to manage your reputation. Mention offers the ability to track specific keywords and various filtering options so you can narrow down the @-mentions and feedback that is most relevant and meaningful for your brand.

Birdeye

Birdeye is another leading platform for social media reputation management. Birdeye collects reviews from review sites and 150+ different platforms, giving users a comprehensive view of their business’ online reputation. You can organize feedback by filtering (rating number, region, product, etc.) them into custom fields. Similar to the other social media reputation management software, it centralizes reviews in a singular platform.

Broadly

Supporting over 3,000 local businesses, Broadly is a great option for small businesses looking to maintain a positive online reputation. Users have the option to automate review requests from customers. Broadly offers the ability to monitor and respond to reviews from Google, Facebook and more within a central platform as well.

Is online reputation management a top priority for your business?

Listen: Your brand’s reputation matters.

Rather than treat it as something beyond your control, you should take steps to secure and boost your social media reputation sooner rather than later.

This means both listening and reacting to conversations related to your business. With social media management tools like Sprout Social, you can roll out a more effective and efficient strategy on social media and beyond.

And if you haven’t already, take a test-drive of Sprout’s full suite of social listening and reputation management features today by signing up for a personalized demo.

The post Social media reputation management: How to stay in good standing with your audience appeared first on Sprout Social.

Decoding those emotions and understanding how customers truly feel about your brand is what sentiment analysis is all about.

But tracking sentiment is no piece of cake.

We’re talking about analyzing thousands of conversations, brand mentions and reviews spread across multiple websites and platforms—some of them happening in real-time.

You need a sentiment analysis tool for the job.

In this post, you’ll find some of the best sentiment analysis tools to help you monitor and analyze customer sentiment around your brand.

• What is a sentiment analysis tool?
• Applications of a sentiment analysis tool
• Top 15 sentiment analysis tools to consider
• Use sentiment analysis tools to make data-driven decisions back by AI

What is a sentiment analysis tool?

A sentiment analysis tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze textual data and pick up on the emotions people are expressing, like joy, frustration or disappointment.

It leverages natural language processing (NLP) to understand the context behind social media posts, reviews and feedback—much like a human but at a much faster rate and larger scale.

Then, it calculates the average sentiment around your brand, classifying it as positive, negative or neutral. Some tools also help you monitor your competitors’ customer sentiment score.

Some sentiment analysis tools can also analyze video content and identify expressions by using facial and object recognition technology.

In the context of AI marketing, sentiment analysis tools help businesses gain insight into public perception, identify emerging trends, improve customer care and experience, and craft more targeted campaigns that resonate with buyers and drive business growth.

Applications of a sentiment analysis tool

Sentiment analysis tools are revolutionizing how businesses understand and respond to customers. Here are some specific ways brands can benefit from these tools:

• Social Listening: Keep an eye on customer opinions and reactions to brands, products, services, campaigns, events and trends on social media.
• Review Management: Analyze customer feedback across multiple platforms and respond promptly and empathetically to improve customer satisfaction.
• Competitive Analysis: Compare sentiment towards your brand with competitors to understand where you stand in terms of positioning and public perception.
• Brand Insights: Gather and interpret data on brand reputation, customer experience, and product strengths and weaknesses to develop a solid brand strategy.
• Opinion Mining: Analyze both customer and employee feedback to get a clear picture of your company’s performance and identify areas for improvement.

Top 15 sentiment analysis tools to consider

Full stack sentiment analysis tools

These tools can pull information from multiple sources and employ techniques like linear regression to detect fraud and authenticate data. They also run on proprietary AI technology, which makes them powerful, flexible and scalable for all kinds of businesses.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social offers all-in-one social media management solutions, including AI-powered listening and granular sentiment analysis.

Monitor millions of conversations happening in your industry across multiple platforms. Sprout’s AI can detect sentiment in complex sentences and even emojis, giving you an accurate picture of how customers truly think and feel about specific topics or brands.

View the average customer sentiment around your brand and track sentiment trends over time. Filter individual messages and posts by sentiment to respond quickly and effectively.

Sprout also supports multilingual sentiment analysis, which helps you understand and resonate with a diverse, international customer base. Access a full scope of data tagged and filtered by smart category, without changing your query, whether by people, place, product or more. Furthermore, our Queries by AI Assist feature generates keyword suggestions for Listening queries that can further enhance your analysis landscape

2. InMoment (Lexalytics)

InMoment is a customer experience platform that uses Lexalytics’ AI to analyze text from multiple sources and translate it into meaningful insights.

It supports over 30 languages and dialects, and can dig deep into surveys and reviews to find the sentiment, intent, effort and emotion behind the words.

3. Medallia

Medallia’s experience management platform offers powerful listening features that can pinpoint sentiment in text, speech and even video.

The platform excels in collecting and analyzing real-time feedback from multiple sources, including social media, surveys, reviews, SMS, emails, voice conversations and more.

4. Qualtrics (Clarabridge)

Qualtrics is an experience management platform that offers Text iQ—a sentiment analysis tool that leverages advanced NLP technology to analyze unstructured data from various sources, including social media, surveys and customer support interactions.

The tool can automatically categorize feedback into themes, making it easier to identify common trends and issues. It can also assign sentiment scores to quantifies emotions and and analyze text in multiple languages.

Social media sentiment analysis tools

Focusing specifically on social media platforms, these tools are designed to analyze sentiment expressed in tweets, posts and comments. They help businesses better understand their social media presence and how their audience feels about their brand.

5. Brandwatch

Brandwatch offers a suite of tools for social media research and management. Their listening tool helps you analyze sentiment along with tracking brand mentions and conversations across various social media platforms.

Classify sentiment in messages and posts as positive, negative or neutral, track changes in sentiment over time and view the overall sentiment score on your dashboard.

6. Buffer

Buffer offers easy-to-use social media management tools that help with publishing, analyzing performance and engagement.

One of the tool’s features is tagging the sentiment in posts as ‘negative, ‘question’ or ‘order’ so brands can sort through conversations, and plan and prioritize their responses.

7. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is another social media management software that specializes in publishing and organizing your inbox.

It offers basic sentiment analysis capabilities in that it lets you add labels like “positive” and “negative” to inbox items that contain specific words, such as “happy”, “great”, “bad” or “awful.”

Add labels to messages manually or use the Inbox Assistant to automatically go through your messages and label all relevant items that contain the specified keywords.

8. Awario

Awario is a specialized brand monitoring tool that helps you track mentions across various social media platforms and identify the sentiment in each comment, post or review.

You can track sentiment over time, prevent crises from escalating by prioritizing mentions with negative sentiment, compare sentiment with competitors and analyze reactions to campaigns.

News sentiment analysis tools

These tools specialize in monitoring and analyzing sentiment in news content. They use News APIs to mine data and provide insights into how the media portrays a brand or topic.

9. Aylien (Quantexa)

Aylien uses AI to monitor, organize and analyze sentiment in news content. This makes it a valuable tool for PR and communications teams to keep an eye on trends and monitor public opinion and perception about brands and topics.

A key feature of the tool is entity-level sentiment analysis, which determines the sentiment behind each individual entity discussed in a single news piece.

10. Cision Communication Cloud

Cision is an AI-powered PR platform with robust media monitoring capabilities.

Its features include sentiment analysis of news stories pulled from over 100 million sources in 96 languages, including global, national, regional, local, print and paywalled publications.

11. Meltwater

Meltwater’s AI-powered tools help you monitor trends and public opinion about your brand. Their sentiment analysis feature breaks down the tone of news content into positive, negative or neutral using deep-learning technology.

The tool can handle 242 languages, offering detailed sentiment analysis for 218 of them. This makes it versatile and useful for tracking global news sentiment.

Text sentiment analysis tools

These tools run on proprietary AI technology but don’t have a built-in source of data tapped via direct APIs, such as through partnerships with social media or news platforms.

12. MonkeyLearn

MonkeyLearn is a simple, straightforward text analysis tool that lets you organize, label and visualize data like customer feedback, surveys and more.

The tool uses AI to detect, categorize and track sentiment over time. You can use ready-made machine learning models or build and train your own without coding. MonkeyLearn also connects easily to apps and BI tools using SQL, API and native integrations.

13. Google NLP API

Google NLP API is a text analysis tool designed to extract insights and opinions from various documents, including emails, chats and social media, through entity and sentiment analysis.

It supports multimedia content by integrating with Speech-to-Text and Vision APIs to analyze audio files and scanned documents. Plus, its Translation API can analyze sentiment across multiple languages.

14. Amazon Comprehend

Amazon’s text analysis tool goes through documents, emails, social media and customer support tickets to uncover insights. It identifies key elements such as phrases, sentiment and topics, and even lets businesses train models to classify documents.

Moreover, it helps maintain data privacy and protects sensitive information by identifying and redacting Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

15. Microsoft Azure

Azure AI Language lets you build natural language processing applications with minimal machine learning expertise. Pinpoint key terms, analyze sentiment, summarize text and develop conversational interfaces.

The platform offers multilingual models that adapt across languages. Azure also maintains strict privacy standards by using text inputs exclusively for training models.

Use sentiment analysis tools to make data-driven decisions backed by AI

AI-powered sentiment analysis tools make it incredibly easy for businesses to understand and respond effectively to customer emotions and opinions.

While there are dozens of tools out there, Sprout Social stands out with its proprietary AI and advanced sentiment analysis and listening features. Try it for yourself with a free 30-day trial and transform customer sentiment into actionable insights for your brand.

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