Sentiment Analysis, also known as Opinion Mining, is a process of extracting opinions inherent to a piece of text or texts. Using natural language processing (NLP), it analyzes emotion, opinion and polarity to understand opinion on a given topic. Sentiment Analysis can be performed on a small scale to draw conclusions about an individual author, as well as on a large scale to assess the demeanor of an entire population based on a database of subjective writings. The technique is advanced in that it can identify the polarity of a sentence without it having to contain an explicitly positive or negative word. Essentially, Sentiment Analysis offers a means of obtaining meaning and understanding from a source of unorganized subjective expressions.
Who uses Sentiment Analysis?
Within the Entertainment Industry, Sentiment Analysis is used to gain insight into an audience’s review of a production or an artist. It does so by scouring the internet for relevant online conversations, tweets and comments, and then processing the data at scale to develop a meaningful conclusion. In the Fashion Industry, designers use Sentiment Analysis to analyze historical customer feedback to previous trends and use the findings to predict the success of new designs. Video Game and App Design Companies use the information derived from Sentiment Analysis to preemptively build software according to popular needs expressed online, implicitly or explicitly.
Understanding the insights and ‘reading the pulse’ of customer feedback is an adopted practice for social media. In addition to understanding your customer, you can also gain an understanding of your competition or business rival. These insights can be of a broad nature, very granular, or both, dependent on your specific needs and insights desired. For example, if you created an advertisement and the background music was not well-received by its audience, a simple change could easily change the negative reviews to be more positive, hence your targeted audience will be much more receptive to your ad.
By adjusting your market strategy, being able to measure your marketing campaign, develop a product with improved quality, improve your customer service, and crisis management are all general examples of how Sentiment Analysis can be used to improve your business.
