Reclassifying Listening Sentiment

Sentiment analysis is a valuable tool for understanding how your audience is feeling about a given topic. However, measuring audience sentiment is a nuanced endeavor and often requires that brands apply their unique context and perspective to ensure an accurate assessment. Especially because sentiment ratings apply across both the Smart Inbox and Social Listening. 

For example, if a gaming publisher was listening for messages around a game their company produces called “War Zone,” they might find their sentiment results to be overwhelmingly negative because the term “war zone” is inherently negative. This can lead to skewed results and an inaccurate analysis on what the sentiment of the conversation on social actually is. Sometimes, sentiment analysis can be unintentionally inaccurate. 

The good news? You can use Sentiment Reclassification  to help you increase the accuracy of Listening sentiment.

Sentiment Reclassification

With Sentiment Reclassification, you can reclassify the sentiment rating that was applied to a message. The second, Sentiment Rulesets, helps with the “war zone” example above, by changing how Sprout’s sentiment classifier interprets words or phrases. 

In the example above, you could make “war zone” a neutral term since it is tied to a name of a game.  By changing the rating on individual messages or words and phrases, you can improve the sentiment accuracy and improve the ratings the algorithm applies to messages.

Sentiment reclassification is great for your Brand Health or custom Listening Topics that are smaller and don’t contain thousands of messages. You can quickly update the sentiment on a message-by-message basis.

Reclassifying message sentiment

To change the sentiment on a message:

1. Navigate to your Topic Insights.
2. Open the Messages tab.
3. Select the Sentiment dropdown menu for the message you wish to reclassify.
4. Select Positive, Neutral or Negative.
   

If you want to reclassify the sentiment of more than one message at once, you can select multiple messages. 

To reclassify the sentiment of more than one message:

1. Select the messages you want to reclassify.
2. Click the sentiment icon .
3. Select Positive, Neutral, Negative or Unclassified.

You can reclassify all messages (up to 1000) by clicking the checkbox at the top of the Messages window.

You can also reclassify more than one message at once from the Message Explorer. To reclassify messages from the Message Explorer:

1. Select the messages you want to reclassify from the Message Explorer window.
2. Click the sentiment icon .
3. Select Positive, Neutral, Negative or Unclassified.

You can reclassify all messages (up to 1000) by clicking the checkbox at the top of the Message Explorer.