How do you monitor and analyze public sentiment?

1 Why monitor public sentiment?

Monitoring public sentiment helps you understand how your audience perceives your brand, products, services, campaigns, and actions. It also helps you identify potential opportunities and threats, such as positive or negative feedback, emerging trends, influencers, competitors, and crises. By monitoring public sentiment, you can anticipate and respond to the needs and expectations of your audience, and adjust your messages and tactics accordingly.

2 How to monitor public sentiment?

There are many tools and methods to monitor public sentiment, depending on your goals, budget, and resources. Social media listening is a common approach that involves using platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube to track conversations about your brand or industry. You can use hashtags, keywords, mentions, tags, comments, likes, shares, and reviews to gauge the volume, tone, and sentiment of the conversations. Media monitoring is another approach that involves using platforms like Google Alerts, Meltwater or Cision to track media coverage related to your brand or industry. Survey and feedback is a third approach that involves using platforms like SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics to collect opinions and preferences from your audience. Automation tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social or Mention can streamline social media listening. Other tools such as BuzzSumo or Moz can measure the reach and impact of media outlets and articles. Finally, metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), or Customer Effort Score (CES) can quantify customer loyalty or happiness.

3 How to analyze public sentiment?

Analyzing public sentiment involves utilizing quantitative and qualitative methods to interpret and evaluate the data and information collected from monitoring. Sentiment analysis, for example, uses algorithms or tools to classify the emotions, attitudes, and opinions expressed in the text or speech. Metrics like sentiment score, polarity, or intensity can be employed to measure the positive, negative, or neutral sentiment of the content. Content analysis employs techniques or tools to identify and categorize the themes, topics, keywords, or phrases in the text or speech. Metrics like frequency, relevance, or prominence can be used to measure the importance or popularity of the content. Network analysis utilizes methods or tools to visualize and analyze the relationships, connections, or interactions among the actors, nodes, or entities in the network. Metrics like centrality, density, or modularity can be used to measure the influence, cohesion, or structure of the network.

4 How to use public sentiment insights?

Using public sentiment insights involves applying the findings and recommendations from your analysis to improve communication strategies and outcomes. To do this, you should align your messages and tone with your audience's sentiment, adapt your channels and platforms to their preferences and behaviors, and adjust your tactics and actions to their feedback. Monitoring and analyzing public sentiment is a valuable skill for public relations professionals as it can help you understand your audience better, identify opportunities and threats, and optimize communication. By using various tools and methods to track sentiment, then using the insights to improve communication, you can enhance brand reputation, customer loyalty, media coverage, and crisis response.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?