Feelings and emotions can be difficult to quantify and yet emotions drive the vast majority of purchasing behaviours, and, decision making in general.  One way of tapping into ‘the subconscious mind’ of consumers and influencers is by analysing the emotions that are frequently shared via the various social media platforms.

Many big consumer brands have been monitoring social media sentiment for a while now, to see what people think about their latest product launch or brand more generally.  This provides useful intelligence to help them tweak approaches and positioning, develop new products and services or deal effectively with crisis management issues.

Here at Sharpe & Abel we thought that this was very interesting, but we wanted to find a way to apply this methodology that would be useful to our typical client base who do not tend to be ‘consumer facing’.  To test it out, we decided to analyse Twitter responses to the topic of ‘HVAC’.  See below:

These are the results of just one high-level example, but it is clear that there is useful information here regarding: what people are talking about, what they really care about, what pleases them and what worries them.

This sort of data could help inform B2B marketing strategies and messaging (e.g. marketing to shopping centres and supermarkets – 27th November, or emphasising green credentials – 3rd November), and policy development and/or lobbying activity (15th-16th and 17th November).  It could also help to inform reputational risk strategies and provide competitor intelligence.

It also provides a snap-shot of this topic over a period of time, one which could easily be extended to cover a quarter, or a year, for instance, so trends could be more meaningfully observed and interpreted.

If you are interested in seeing more of these analyses, or perhaps have ideas for other topics to investigate, please contact us at results@sharpeandabel.com.