It is commonly accepted that companies need to monitor their brands in social media channels. There is a preconception that reputation management is needed to monitor, control and rectify all the bad things that were being mooted about brands in social media.
However, a recent report by researchers at the Pennsylvania State University, found that nearly half of brand conversations were just comments without any negative or positive sentiment. The report monitored tweets between April – July 2008.
Information seeking and providing accounted for another 29.2% and only 22.3% of brand tweets had any sentiment attached.
Of the 150,000 tweets monitored the report found that:-
- 48.5% had made neutral comments
- 11.1% sought brand information
- 18.1% provided information
- 22.3% added comments or added “sentiment”
Another however, of those 22.3% that added sentiment, not all were negative and broke down as follows:-
- Excellent 33.0%
- Good 19.4%
- Medium 14.2%
- Bad 15.9%
- Terrible 17.6%
So, it seems that not all brand conversations are bad. The report clearly illustrates how social media is a great channel to engage with your consumers. If you can tap into those that are talking positively and draw them in further then social media marketing is a clear winner. Equally if you can connect with any dissidents and make them change their opinions then another marketing battle is won.
My final however would be that this report is based on 150,000 tweets during April – July 2008. Twitter has matured immensely in that period, the number of users has grown exponentially as has the perception that social media is a channel to express opinions. I believe a more current study would show a growing use of sentiment and potentially negative sentiment.
Bottom line: this report shows that brands are being spoken about, sentiment is used, not necessarily negatively and that brands have huge potential for marketing in social media. Reputation management/reputation monitoring, whatever we want to call it is very much a required process.
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