Social Sentiment Indicator

Facebook and Twitter aren’t the only ones swimming in oceans of data. Most of those tweets, updates, and posts are pretty public, making that data public.

Businesses that want to know how the public sees them can hire a dude to scrape that data, crunch the numbers, and tell them how they’re doing with a social sentiment indicator. A social sentiment indicator measures consumer attitudes towards a business. This is great data for the marketing department, as well as the business as a whole. A business’ product and service offerings, promotions, changes to internal operations (think: customer service), and brand image can all be affected by the social sentiment indicator.

The indicator also acts as feedback, to see if whatever changes the business made worked (or not). Was that marketing campaign that tells people we’re donating $0.01 for every purchase to every surviving polar bear a win or a flop? Should we have left our branding alone, or do people like it? The social sentiment indicator can shed some light.

Besides being helpful to the business, these indicators are also helpful to investors in deciding where to throw their weight. For instance, Elon Musk’s tweets have notably affected his Tesla stock’s numbers. He even got in trouble with the SEC for tweeting some kind-of-misleading information to potential investors, which caused investors to jump ship. Oops.

In a business sphere so reliant on recommendations and reviews, in the competitive internet sphere, reputation is everything.