Millions (if not billions) of comments, posts, tweets, etc. are published online every day. Companies around the world make use of the data, collected from monitoring social media and traditional media. However, managing that amount of data generated every second is certainly a challenge. Data gathered from conversation analysis can serve many purposes – from monitoring how people see your brand to preventing potential reputational crises.
What’s conversation analysis?
Conversation analysis has a long history as a research method in social sciences. In social sciences (sociolinguistics, to be precise), conversational analysis is the research of talk produced in everyday interactions. In sociolinguistics, the main goal of conversation analysis is to describe and observe how people interact and understand the conversation.
In the field of social listening and media monitoring, conversation analysis takes a somewhat different form. While performing media monitoring, we analyse the conversations online users have on social media. By examining people’s interactions online, we can gain valuable insights into their perception of a brand or a social issue, for example.
Conversational analysis usually happens through the use of AI, natural language processing, machine learning, and algorithms.
How are social listening and conversation analysis different?
Reading this, you might wonder about the difference between social listening and conversation analysis. After all, they both analyse social media conversations and interpret the data to get actionable insights. All of this is true but think of conversation analysis as one of the methods in social listening and media monitoring. The main difference between the two is that conversational analysis goes deeper into the conclusions we get.
While social listening monitors mostly opinions and sentiment, the conversational analysis focuses on interpreting the data. That allows for a better understanding of how your brand is perceived and ultimately – better data-based decision-making.
Imagine a scenario where you monitor mentions of your brand, and you stumble across negative feedback. Conversation analysis will help you understand why you received negative comments and make efforts to minimise them in the future.
Why should I do conversation analysis?
Conversational analysis has many purposes and uses, but one of the most helpful ones is gaining consumer insights. Consumer insights allow you to understand your audience’s needs, suggestions, and overall sentiment toward your brand.
- Understand the reasons behind negative or positive comments
- Identify when people mention your brand the most (and the reasons behind it)
- Analyse the audience’s language and tone of voice so you can improve the communication strategy
- Understand how the members of your audience interact with each other (what they find important, inspiring, or controversial)
- Listen to your audience’s opinions on your services or products to improve them
- Improve customer service
People online share their opinions all the time. And they love it when business listens to their point of view. These opinions can be especially helpful for a company that wants to improve its products or services. For example, McDonald’s switched to paper straws after customers suggested it. Conversational analysis can also help you spot trends when they’re just beginning to gain momentum. Adidas, for example, created running shoes from recycled plastic ocean waste after analysing customer needs.
What kind of data can I gather for conversational analysis?
The conversational analysis covers what we call – implicit feedback. Usually, when brands want to know how people feel about them, they opt for surveys, which can give great insights, however, they only answer specific questions. Implicit feedback, on the other hand, comes from various sources such as social media, forums, blogs, etc.
Most of the time, with conversation analysis, we cover mentions on social media, third-party reviews, comments, and sometimes chatbot/chat conversations.
What to focus on during a conversation analysis?
We discussed the benefits of conversational analysis, but the real question is how we do it? To do a detailed analysis, we require a media monitoring tool. Media monitoring tools are software programs used specifically to observe mentions of your brand or organisation. Most monitoring platforms allow you to scan for mentions of your competitors too. Besides all of that, you can also use them to track sentiment and most importantly – the reasons behind it.
Here are some of the metrics you can focus on during a conversational analysis:
Mentions of your brand
Detecting mentions of your brand manually can be a hassle, especially if you’re a big brand. By using a media monitoring tool, you can see all your mentions at a glance, and gather valuable data quickly. Monitoring mentions is one of the essential steps in social listening and conversational analysis. It’s the first step to tracking how people feel about your business and how engaged they are with it.
Peak of conversation
Peaks of conversation show when your organisation received the most mentions during a specific period. With conversational analysis, you can go deep within the conversations and see the reasons behind each peak.
Keywords
With conversational analysis, you can gather a dataset of the keywords associated with your brand. That can help you improve your communication strategy and have an understanding of the language your audience uses when talking about your brand.
Sentiment
The sentiment is another crucial metric to follow when media monitoring. It tells you whether people feel negatively or positively about your brand. With conversational analysis, you can go a step further and explain why your audience feels that way.
Understanding the reasons behind negative opinions is essential if you want to improve your products or customer service. You can use conversational analysis to understand customer behaviour better. Sometimes what customers say online, and their purchasing behaviour are different, and conversational analysis can help you find the causes for that.
Final Thoughts
Conversation analysis is a great way to understand your customers by using their real opinions. With A Data Pro’s conversational analysis services, you can get insights into your customers’ interactions and conversations online. We can also combine the data from the analysis with other metrics to achieve a holistic view of your audience’s behaviour and opinions. If you have any questions or if you’re interested in our services, don’t hesitate to contact us!
