From Negative to Positive: How Sentiment Tracking Can Transform Your Business

What is sentiment?

Imagine being able to accurately measure how people truly feel about your brand. Insights like these could greatly impact your future marketing decisions, help identify emerging trends, and improve the overall customer experience. The good news? This is all possible through sentiment tracking and analysis.

How do you track sentiment?

Sentiment tracking involves cataloguing every comment, reaction, private message and piece of content that mentions your business. This allows you to monitor public perception and understand how people feel about your brand.

First you must define the channels that you aim to track sentiment on. Then, you must define the metrics of measurement for those channels. If you were to monitor social media on Facebook for example, you may choose to split the reactions that people can have to your post so that likes and love reactions will count as positive while angry and sad reactions will count as negative sentiment.

With social media you also have comments and even mentions. Sometimes these are more subjective based on how you interpret the messages but generally you will be able to get a sense of whether what is said is positive, negative or neutral. However, we would always say watch out for bots and if there are any spam comments or messages then define them as unclassified and remove them from your data set.

The basics of categorising and tagging sentiment

In its simplest form, you can tag engagements as positive, negative and neutral. An example of this for comments on social posts would be:

Positive Sentiment: “I love the new features, it’s great!”

Negative Sentiment: “Avoid this brand. The customer service was terrible.”

Neutral Sentiment: “I purchased this item last week, and it's alright.”

The Importance of categories and cross-tagging

While positive, negative and neutral sentiment tagging is sentiment tracking in it’s basic form, the most useful way to make it is ustilising cross-tagging. By having multiple categories and tags on sentiment engagements, you are able to analyse one category against another, resulting in more meaningful data insights.

There are many ways of categorising these incoming sentiment engagements. The categories you have will be specific to your company and industry. If your business operates internationally, you could decide to categorise it by country. You may also want to break down your analysis by the products and services.

The best way to develop your categories is by understanding your business and your marketing plan and by giving yourself objectives for the sentiment.

Example of Sentiment Category Tracking

Phase 1 | Define your objectives

I want to know:

1. How they feel about specific business products and services

2. What channels or platforms are receiving the most positivity and negativity

Phase 2 | Define your categories

Category 1: Sentiment

Subcategory 1: Positive, Negative and Neutral

Category 2: Business

Subcategory 2: Product A, Product B, Product C, Service A, Service B

Category 3: Platforms

Subcategory 3: Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Youtube

Phase 3 | Tagging your sentiment

John Smith | Instagram Comment:

“I just got the new [Product A] and I really like the new design!”

This type of comment could have multiple tags: Positive, Product A, and Instagram.

Tagging these means you can get answers to your objectives and gain valuable insights around your brand presence.

Tracking social reactions

You can also review sentiment by examining the likes on your posts. On platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, users can only like a post, while on Facebook and LinkedIn, they can respond with likes, loves, or even thumbs down, providing you with a clearer understanding of people’s opinions. By analysing the reactions to your posts, you can gain insight into what content speaks to your audience most effectively and brand perception. For instance, if you share a serious post and receive only laugh reactions, it may suggest that your messaging or tone hasn’t resonated as you intended. With this insight, you can reflect on why that might be and look for ways to improve your future posts.

Where do I measure sentiment?

The time needed to complete this will often vary significantly depending on your industry and scale of your business, as this will usually correlate with the number of engagements you receive. However, you can streamline the process using online tools. Sentiment analysis platforms like Sprout Social, Brandwatch, and Meltwater gather comments, messages, and mentions from multiple sources, allowing you to tag and analyse them all from a single interface. Alternatively, you can track manually through well-organised template spreadsheets, but this can often be inefficient.

Sentiment insights

Once the hard work is done, you'll get to dive into your data—this is where it gets exciting. This is when you'll start seeing the results. For example, you might uncover that a specific topic generates a significant amount of negative sentiment. You could find, for instance, that over the past three months, negative feedback on customer service has risen by 33%.

Insights like these provide a clear roadmap for where your business needs to take action. With this information, you can make informed decisions, such as enhancing your training programs, closely monitoring staff performance, launching a targeted campaign to address the issue at hand, or even developing your brand to ensure you’re communicating the right messages to your audiences.

Consider the case of the home delivery service Hermes, which has rebranded itself as Evri. This change was driven by the overwhelmingly negative sentiment associated with the Hermes name, largely due to their poor service reputation. By recognising and responding to customer feedback, they aimed to rebuild trust and improve their brand image, demonstrating the importance of using insights to guide strategic decisions.

How Dynam do it.

Some of our clients' KPIs revolve around sentiment. For these clients, we create a monthly sentiment report that assesses the positives, neutrals, and less flattering aspects of their brand's sentiment. The report offers a clear and transparent view of how your brand is perceived in the market. It includes key highlights from the month, along with a thorough analysis of the data.

Notably, the report can not only be used to identify areas for improvement but also highlight your strengths, showcasing what your brand is doing well. This dual perspective lets you capitalise on your successes while addressing challenges. While it may be uncomfortable to confront negative feedback, we firmly believe that acknowledging these issues is crucial, as it is the only way to tackle them head-on and foster continuous improvement.

Is tracking sentiment for you?

We’re here to help. With experience working with global companies, we have expertise in handling and reporting on sentiment analysis. Together, we can provide your business with the insights it needs to address potential issues before they escalate.

Get in touch. We would love to hear from you!