While you’ve always been able to track sentiment on both public and dark posts on the BrandTotal platform, now you can gain a deeper understanding of sentiment by viewing how it trends over time. Let’s look at some of the great things you can learn about your brand from this:

1. Understand sentiment trends over time & their impact

You can view your brand’s or campaign’s sentiment trends in proportion to the overall volume by switching between stacked out of 100% or stacked by volume; start with stacked to 100% to see the overall trend of positive or negative - more red is negative; more blue is positive. And then switch to stacked by volume to understand how many comments there were each week; perhaps your sentiment went down but there were very few comments, so does it really matter? Alternatively, if it was a very busy week for comments and sentiment declined, you will want to investigate the cause.

2. See how long a sentiment trend has been going on

By viewing the sentiment trends in different time units you can zoom in or out to view a wider/ narrower picture of sentiment state. The image below shows the difference between looking at the 30 day view vs. the 90 day view.

3. Understand which words are impacting your sentiment

Select a particular week you want to drill into, and then hover over the keywords to the right. First of all you will see different words that are “breakouts” for each week you select (i.e. words that did not appear in the previous week). Also, if you hover over the words, you will see the comments impacting a specific word. You can even click through to see the creative where a particular comment was written.

4. Track an entire conversation that is happening in the Dark

BrandTotal’s sentiment trends is the only sentiment analysis tool that lets you analyze how your audience is reacting to dark, i.e. hidden posts that are targeting specific audience groups. Simply select to view all comments, public comments or dark comments. As you can see in the example below, this brand’s public posts had a much stronger positive sentiment than their dark posts. This could indicate a poor reaction to their message from their target audience, and should certainly be investigated further.

5. Compare any two brands or campaigns to see differences in trends

You can select any competitor or any competing campaign to view the sentiment trends over time, benchmarking yourself against the competition or the category as a whole. If you’ve recently launched a campaign and want to see how you measure up, this tool will be invaluable.

Interested in learning more about BrandTotal and how to measure your brand’s sentiment over time? Get in touch!