Conversations about your brand, product, service, or competitors are happening all over the social web. The ability to identify the sentiment of conversations online is a powerful asset for any business as you can use this information to act accordingly. Find out how

1. There’s a long standing debate on what social media metrics matter the most and which should be tracked.
In the early days of social media, success was defined by the number of followers or fans a company had on
accounts. Social media account managers started tracking and strategizing around this metric in order to
grow their following. But just focusing on volume was too narrow. Of course, large brands will have a large
following; these brands are recognizable so it's difficult to say the number of followers directly indicates the
success of their social media presence.
Soon, measurement grew to include the number of actively engaged followers. These being the followers
posting on your page, commenting on your posts, and participating in any activity the company includes on
their page or account. While this was certainly a better way to measure social media presence, there are still
inconsistencies surrounding this as well. Because engagement is essential to a thriving community, it doesn't
tell the whole story of what is happening on your company’s social media presence. Was the engagement
positive or negative; could this engagement actually hinder your online reputation?
This is where social media sentiment comes in, sentiment is an important component when measuring your
brand's reputation. Sentiment is now a readily available resource for companies to utilize without even having
to ask for their customer’s feedback. It adds a rich compliment to your other site metrics and with tools
available today, it has become crucial information to capture.
Tips for Understanding Your Online Sentiment
• Monitor keywords surrounding your brand, product, service as well as your competitors and industry to
understand how your sentiment stacks up.
• View sentiment data around product releases, press appearances, and social media posts to understand
the reaction of your community.
• Analyze sentiment over time to identify trends and pinpoint spikes in positive or negative sentiment.
Understanding Social Media Sentiment
Twitter AccountPublishTwitter AccountSentiment
Tip:
Monitor keywords
surrounding your brand
or product to learn about
your online sentiment.
Tip:
Use a Sentiment Tool, like
Viralheat to make tracking
sentiment easy.
Great Fact:
30% of all social mentions
about brands are negative.
Understand Your Audience
Using sentiment to understand your audience can be incredibly eye opening. Since sentiment uncovers
the tone of your community’s engagement, you can easily find out what type of content resonates most
with them. By trying different content types and analyzing the response, you can identify your most active
demographic and strategize to provide more content that resonates.
By diving further into your sentiment you can also find patterns in your audience’s behavior. Perhaps Mondays
typically garner more negative sentiment while Fridays repeatedly have more positive sentiment. Schedule
your content to optimize for trends in your audience base.

2. Learn From Past Successes and Failures
Social media sentiment gives unique insight into how the public perceives a brand. By tracking sentiment
data overtime you can correlate events that happen around your brand with the sentiment recorded for
that day. Learn what events, social media posts, or product releases garnered the most positive or negative
sentiment. Then use these correlations to plan and strategize future activity.
Many times brands see their positive sentiment spike around sales or promotions and negative sentiment
will many times increase during service outages or customer service problems. Learn from the successes
and failures to tailor your future social media efforts to improve overall sentiment.
Work to Improve Social Media Sentiment
The goal with any metric you are tracking is to improve your performance and tracking sentiment is no
different. In this case, the goal is to improve your positive sentiment while decreasing your negative
sentiment. There are plenty of reasons why your social sentiment might be under performing, so it is
important to pinpoint areas that need improvement so you can actively remedy them.
Improving social sentiment doesn’t have to be difficult. Stay active on social media: publish posts that engage
and interest your audience, participate in conversations that mention your brand, and handle questions and
complaints that come in through social media quickly and effectively are great places to start. Once you
have a good grip on what your community likes in terms of content or promotions, try strategizing to include
more of these activities which will help to improve your overall brand sentiment. Of course, sentiment is a
metric that will grow and change overtime, review your metrics regulary tand tailor your efforts to optimize
your sentiment.
How to reach us
Email: info@viralheat.com
Web: www.viralheat.com
Compare Yourself To the Market
To fully understand where your brand stands in terms of sentiment you’ll need to set a baseline for your
industry. Track the social media sentiment of keywords that are associated with your industry. Gather data,
enough data to ensure you are reviewing an accurate data set.
After understanding how your business’ industry fares with social sentiment, start tracking sentiment
directly related to your brand or products and that of your competitors’. Knowing where your brand stands
compared to your industry and competitors will be the key indicator to knowing if your sentiment is
comparable, above, or below the industry standard. It has been said that 75% of people have at one point
talked about a brand on social media with an estimated 30% of those mentions being negative. Paying
attention to your sentiment can help you to protect your online reputation and remedy issues that arise.
Tip:
Viralheat monitors
sentiment of keywords on
Twitter and Facebook.
Tip:
Watch sentiment during
sales or promotions.
About Viralheat:
Viralheat is the social media management and intelligence company that makes it easy for you to manage
social and put it to work for your business. Trusted by more than 10,000 brands, Viralheat combines social
media management and intelligence in a single platform encompassing account management, monitoring,
engagement, and analytics. With its comprehensive platform and flexible pricing, Viralheat easily scales as
your social programs and business needs evolve.