How To Build a Social Media Listener for Brand Sentiment

Imagine being in a room where you can hear all of the messages being said about your business, product, or service in one space. You hear the good and the bad, and that can influence your decisions and guide your marketing.

With a social media listener, you can create this type of advanced strategy for connecting with your target customers to learn what they think about your brand.

Looking For Proxies?

Get the data you need from across the web!

Take A Look

Analyzing social media offers numerous benefits, but none of them is more impressive than being able to clearly understand what others think about your company. This enables you to adjust to changes in market climate, secure resources to build your next product and enhance the way people perceive your business. It could even help you mitigate financially challenging consequences if something does not go well.

Here’s how to listen to social media to benefit your company.

What Social Listening Means

Social listening is a form of online brand monitoring that, as the name implies, involves tracking the mentions of your brand on social media. What makes this process different than just tracking brand mentions is that a social media listener can operate in real time. That is empowering to any business, especially a small company that may not have the budget of a larger organization doing over-the-top marketing and advertising.

By analyzing social media, you can learn how customers think and feel about your products and services. You learn what they want and what they do not want. You also learn what they think of your brand. 

You can listen to social media for many other reasons as well, including tracking responses to ad campaigns or finding out what people think about our competitors. For most companies, a tailored approach can tackle tracking more than one of these areas, providing a wide ranging way of capturing all of the information about your business. There are many ways that marketers can use sentiment analysis regarding your brand and your competitors, for example, to improve your position on the market.

In this guide, we will discuss how to build a social media listener. But before we get into the details of that process, let’s focus on what a social media listener is and what it can do for your company. 

A good starting point is understanding what a social media measurement is from the standpoint of monitoring. It is about determining how well your social media marketing is working for you, like tracking important metrics like engagement rates of impressions.

However, social monitoring and social listening are very different.

• Social monitoring allows you to look for brand mentions. It will alert you when there is a mention of your band online.
• Social listening gives you a complete overview of all online conversations about your brand, services, and products, as well as your competitors, providing more valuable insights that you can use to make strategic decisions.

The difference is the analysis. Data analysis of social media is very different than just monitoring for mentions. It’s a form of social media data collection that doesn’t only gather, but interprets the results you have. That makes that information – in a crowded room with numerous people speaking at one time – easier to understand and apply to your next decision-making process. 

The Benefits of Social Media Listening

Most companies think they know what customers believe or feel about their company, brand, and services. After all, if your product is selling, then they must be happy, right? Not necessarily. In fact, without a social media listener, you may be unable to capture the information you need to grow your company instead of allowing it to remain stagnant. 

Consider the benefits a social media listener can offer to your company. 

• Understand your brand reputation: Your branding may be very specific and your marketing may reflect this. However, your brand reputation is the way that customers interpret that marketing and their experiences with your company. You need to know how they feel.
• Understand your customers: You can also benefit from having a social media listener because it allows you to better understand your customers’ needs, goals, limitations, and desires. You can understand what your customers’ pain points are and devise solutions around them using these tools. 
• Competitive intelligence: A social media listening tool can also provide you with exceptional insight into what your competitors are doing, planning, and providing to their customers, who may be your customers as well. In some situations, it gives you the ability to launch new products and services before the competition will. 
• Crisis management: Social listening may help you to avert a significant disaster. If your social media listener picks up on a specifically harmful topic or an accusation that could bring poor publicity, you can act on it faster and get the support you need sooner. 
• Improve marketing outcomes: Social media listening gives you the ability to find out what customers need and want, allowing you to then tailor your marketing campaigns around those valuable topics. This ultimately drives success for each campaign you launch and minimizes financial loss from your next effort.

These are just a few of the many ways in which social listening tools can change the way you manage your business. What’s more, you do not have to pay significantly large amounts of money for specialized services. You can build a social listening tool yourself, with some careful planning and existing tools to help you achieve the best outcome.

For modern businesses, a social media listening tool is a powerful way to maintain their competitive edge and grow their business. Chances are very good that their customers benefit from it, and their competition is already using it.

Analyzing Social Media With Existing Tools

Social media analyzing is a hot topic, and with that comes the launch of dozens of tools that aim to help businesses find out what customers are saying and thinking. Now, we will list a few of the tools here that are good starting points with a warning. There are limitations to any of these tools if they do not provide you with data analysis of social media. You need a scenario that enables you to listen to social media and gain sentiment analysis insights. We will provide the specific strategies for doing that in just a moment.

• HubSpot Social Media Management Software: HubSpot offers social media management software that allows you to input specific phrases to create a monitoring stream. It can help you monitor for mentions of your company and provide an AI-generated recommended action step to provide some level of analysis.
• BuzzSumo: BuzzSumo is another social media listening tool that is a good option for content discovery and research. It allows you to track trends that are important to your business, which can guide you in making decisions. For example, you can monitor social media marketing metrics this way.
• Brandwatch: Specifically designed to monitor conversations for brand mentions, Brandwatch is a helpful tool for current trend tracking. It offers insights into topics that are trending within your industry or in relation to your brand.

These and other tools will help you listen to social media. They will certainly provide insights that you can use. However, they often have a high price tag for the information they provide to you and you only have limited influence over the scope of platforms being monitored.

That is why creating your own social media listener tends to be the better option for most businesses that want to get the most out of the process.

How to Build a Listener for Social Media and Sentiment Analysis 

A social media listener and brand sentiment is the process of creating a system that will collect, analyze, and interpret social media mentions and achieve this in real time. Developing a tool like this provides data analysis to social media, allowing you to capture a wide range of important mentions and determine if those sentiments are positive, negative, or neutral. That empowers you to take action.

There are various steps to creating a tool like this, and with this guide we will break down the specific strategies you can use to get started in no time. We’ll also mention a wide range of tools – including some of our own – that can help you with the details.

Data Collection: The first step in the process is to capture data. That is, you need to find a way for your tool to have a stream of data it can use to analyze. Data collection happens in multiple ways, but we recommend the use of web scraping.

This process allows you to set up a tool that will visit the target websites you desire, capture the information they offer about your brand, and then bring the valuable details back to be analyzed by your sentiment analysis tools. To do this, we recommend setting up the following tools to help you:

• BeautifulSoup: BeautifulSoup is a core tool for web scraping in Python. It is one of the easiest tools to use and, once in place, it will allow you to scape data, or extract data, from websites you select. 
• Scrapy: Another Python library that is helpful for web scraping is Scrapy. When used in this way, it is a high-performance web scraping tool that allows you to manage even complicated components such as logins forms and cookies. Using Scrapy allows for asynchronous processing, data pipelines, and scalability beyond other tools. 

These tools will work to gather posts, comments, and hashtags from social media sites. You can set them up to capture very specific information that is related to your business including your brand, product names, or other details. These will essentially collect the data for you – note that we’re talking about automated sentiment analysis here, as it’s the only way to monitor and collect information from a source as wide as social media.

Proxies: Before going further, it is critical to consider the importance of putting in place a proxy service. A proxy tool will allow you to protect your IP address from the target website or any other that wants to track what you are doing or monitor your activity.

Using a rotating data center proxy, you can carefully pull data from websites without anyone knowing where you are, and that adds a layer of protection to your business activities. Proxies are also highly useful if you have a global business and want to access regional platforms or websites.

To be clear, you should only use a proxy for scraping in a legal manner and never use it against the terms and conditions of the website. We’re strong advocates of ethical data mining, and we encourage you to read up on the topic before starting.

Preprocessing: The next step is to put this data through a preprocessing process. That is, you will put it through the following tools to help reduce some of the clutter and make it easier for the end tools to analyze that information. We recommend using the following tools:

• NLTK: NLTK is a powerful suite of libraries that can help with processing English to ready it for semantics. It is an excellent tool because of how easy it is to use. 
• SpaCy: You can also use SpaCy for preprocessing. It can prepare and clean text quickly, providing an easy way for you to get your content ready for the next page. 
• TextBlob: TextBlob is an overall simple-to-use API that will provide you with part-of-speech tagging and classification. 

Your goal is to have these tools, all of which are natural language processing (NLP) techniques, to remove the noise, tokenizing and lemmatizing the content you have scraped from the website. In this process, the goal is to remove the noise or to get rid of any words within the social media posts that are not valuable, such as parts of speech like “a” and “the” to make it easier for the analyzation to happen.

Tokenization replaces potentially sensitive information, such as names or company secrets, from the content so that data privacy is maintained without changing the content’s contents or sentiment. Finally, lemmatization works to group like words together, such as words that typically mean the same thing but are different parts of speech.

Looking For Proxies?

Get the data you need from across the web!

Take A Look

Sentiment analysis: Now that we have all of this work done, the next step is to apply sentiment analysis. The objective of this process is to add sentiment analysis to your social media listener. Remember, it is not as beneficial to just collect data – you need to analyze it. There are various ways to set up this type of process, but some of the best pre-trained models – those already trained to provide you with an easy-to-apply strategy include the following:

• VADER: This is a great tool for assigning sentiment for social media because it works well for short texts. VADER Sentiment Analysis will provide accuracy in labeling your content as positive, negative, or neutral. 
• BERT: If you want a higher level or more in-depth type of tool that will provide more detailed information, BERT models are ideal. They go deeper by allowing you to gather information not just about a brand but details about it. You can count on this tool to be more extensive to use, and it requires a bit more experience. 
• Custom machine learning models: Another option is to build your own social media listening sentiment analysis tool. It requires some programming experience, but it can offer excellent insights and be worth it once you start to truly understand what your customers have to say.
• Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis: ABSA is a deeper dive even still into that content. This type of tool allows you to not just learn about your brand, but about product features or customer service. You get a more in-depth look at sentiment analysis using this tool. This component is excellent for identifying customer opinions on a specific feature you have or a specific component of your customer service. You can learn more in our guide to implementing Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis.

Each of these tools allows you to create a clear understanding of what people are talking about on social media using your brand’s name or other detailed information. The good news is that this type of data analysis of social media can work in the background, constantly listening and ready to capture important data when it is available.

Building your own social media listener using these tools simply makes sense. It allows you to create a specific result and control the parameters. It can also be a lot less expensive to build your own social media listener for data analysis of social media instead of paying a company to use their products.

Data Visualization: The final step in the process of creating a social media listener is to visualize your data. You have the data, you have the reviews you need, but now you want to put together all of those thousands of mentions in a meaningful way so you can determine what specifically to do next. A data visualization tool makes that possible. We recommend several specific options, though there are many others available to select from as well.

• Streamlit: Streamlit is a comprehensive solution. It allows you to input a few lines of code and get a fantastic tool to monitor the sentiment in your data. It also allows you to transform Python scripts into interactive web apps, which allows you to interact with data and gain better insight. You can put it together in minutes, unlike software programs that take months to develop.
• Matplotlib: For anyone who is a visual lover and those who enjoy graphs as a way to create information and make decisions, Matplotlib is one of the best resources to make this possible. You can create interactive figures that allow you to create a visual that fits your specific needs. It is easy to use and can be a lot of fun to interact with. 
• Power BI: Power MI is a Microsoft product, and for those who want to keep using Microsoft for projects, it can be an excellent data visualizer. It is a self-service tool, though you can purchase customized help if you want to do so. It is easy to use to create detailed analytics for a variety of tasks. It also allows you to create a custom dashboard that can really help your data come to life.

With these tools, social media data analysis becomes interactive and informative. You can use these visualizers to provide you with insight into how people feel about your brand based on the social media posts you have pulled. Doing that allows you to then:

• Handle critical situations right away so that you can reduce the risk of bigger problems
• Optimize your marketing campaigns to get a better ROI
• Handle customer successes and make changes to overcome customer concerns 
• Make decisions on the products and services you plan to offer
• Make sure your next investment meets the needs and desires of your customers

With data analysis of social media, you remain at the top of your game. You can consistently work to improve your business based on the influence your customers have. Whether you want a way to minimize risks or improve campaigns, social media listener creation is a must.

Let Rayobyte Help You With Your Social Media Listener Process

Data analysis of social media starts with gathering data, and to do that, you need to minimize any data risk. That is where Rayobyte comes into play. Use our proxy services to help you capture the valuable data you need from social media to create significant outcomes. Build a social media listener that helps you make decisions. Contact Rayobyte now for a demo.

The information contained within this article, including information posted by official staff, guest-submitted material, message board postings, or other third-party material is presented solely for the purposes of education and furtherance of the knowledge of the reader. All trademarks used in this publication are hereby acknowledged as the property of their respective owners.