Unpopular Opinions: What Twitter Trends Reveal That Online Reviews Can’t
Unpopular opinions go against the grain. They contradict what’s customary or widely accepted, and they often result in adverse or divisive conversations. Today, unpopular opinions are seen more and more among Twitter trends. The 2020 experience in general, especially with more time at home, has emboldened tweeters to indulge in expressing and discussing unpopular opinions. It’s a trend that spans a variety of topics and touches all industries.
Uncovering the unpopular opinions swarming across the Twitter-verse can, however, actually provide a deeper level of insight than online reviews. Not everyone takes the time to write an online review or submit complaints. Businesses mining Twitter can see widely held, as well as unpopular, opinions and how social media users interact with businesses and each other within the conversation. What do you learn from this? You learn what people are actually thinking, and in real time. When using a social media analytics program like Northern Light Social Analytics, an adept marketing sleuth can stay ahead of unpopular opinions, examine community conversations, glean competitive intelligence, and uncover new marketing opportunities.
How can Social Analytics help you stay ahead of any unpopular opinions associated with your business or industry?
Social Analytics is organized by industry, with access to Twitter content specific to the IT, life sciences, healthcare, financial services, and consumer products sectors. Northern Light’s innovative machine-learning based AI analyzes the content of across tweets to ensure topic relevance. Users are able to perform analyses of relevant hashtags, keywords, author accounts, and sentiments within each industry.
From within your own industry platform in Social Analytics, you can examine your company’s Twitter account, paying particular attention to the related sentiments, or the positive and negative terms that tweeters use in their posts. Any negative sentiments, trends, or unpopular opinions can be promptly discovered and addressed. As we discuss later on, you may be able to examine how the competition handles similar opinions and situations on Twitter.
How can Social Analytics help you assess community conversations on unpopular opinions?
Let’s take the opinion statement, “Now is not a good time to invest in a new car.” How can you actually access the conversation on Twitter? We can start by analyzing the keywords “new car market” and “market” through the Automotive platform of Social Analytics. The top three sentiments related to these keywords include “best,” “innovation,” and “like.” Through this analysis, we also learn that there is actually a lot to be said on Twitter regarding the growth of electric vehicle sales. The hashtags #ev, #tesla, and #electricvehicles are all within the top 10 associated hashtags.
If we add #covid19 to our analysis, we learn the top three sentiments are “recovery,” “insights,” and “strong support,” which all still paint the market in a positive light. Examine your own marketing against the associated opinions and influencer accounts. Are you doing what you can to ensure customers know what you’re doing to ease their fears in an uncertain economy?
How can unpopular opinions be used for competitive intelligence and new marketing opportunities?
We can continue our automotive analysis further and look at the opinion that it’s not safe to buy a car right now. If we examine #autosales, we learn that the conversation containing #contactless is 60% semantically similar. The top sentiments associated with #autosales and #contactless are “available,” “interest,” “top,” and “best,” and it’s a topic discussed widely across general and business news-related accounts. In terms of keywords, “contactless” is mentioned more often than “price” in the conversation; however, we also learn that #discounts is 70% semantically similar to the #autosales, #contactless conversation, so pricing is a big part of the conversation.
Marketers need to know how Twitter users are self-identifying with unpopular opinions. With Social Analytics, you can metrically uncover if an opinion, whether unpopular or not, is really a rare sentiment, or if Twitter trends show a large following and widespread engagement in the same conversation. Social Analytics allows you to interact using the right conversational tone and keywords. And your interactions can be based on real data, instead of just general opinion statements. This is especially important for marketers in terms of distinguishing whether a change is needed for a particular product or service, or if the most effective option is to enter and change the conversation.
Social Analytics also allows users to examine specific user accounts. By analyzing the accounts of your competition, you can see the keywords, hashtags, and full-text of their marketing efforts. What opinions associated with their customer insights do you, or could you, address better? And come up with a marketing strategy and plan of action!
Contact Northern Light
With the right social media analytics, even the most unpopular Twitter opinions can yield dynamite marketing intel and strategy power! For more information on how Northern Light’s Social Analytics platform can maximize your social media marketing efforts, contact us today.