WHAT IS SENTIMENT ANALYSIS?
The rise of social media allows anyone to share their personal thoughts and feelings on certain subjects. Oftentimes these comments posted to social media detail how the person may feel about a business or product. Companies have taken notice of this and have been collecting data to get a better understanding on how their customers feel towards their company and their products.
Sentiment analysis is a procedure where words are assigned different float values, in this case, between 1 and -1 based on how positive or negative the word is. These float values are then added together to determine if the overall chunk of text is generally positive, negative or neutral, with 1 being positive, 0 being neutral and -1 being negative. Sentiment analysis is extremely useful for businesses who would like to identify customer sentiment, also known as a specific view or attitude, towards a service, brand or particular product. Sentiment analysis is invaluable for any company that wants to quantify subjective information in text in order to know how their company is viewed by their customers. Learning what customers like and dislike allows companies to pivot towards a more successful and accurate business model, leading to increased customer satisfaction.
OUR PROJECT
For this particular project, our team worked with an insurance company named State Farm. Our goal was to grasp the overall perception of State Farms customers through sentiment analysis among the social media platforms that State Farm is associated with. After researching State Farm on different social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, our team decided that Twitter had the most authentic and genuine mentions of State Farm and would therefore provide a more accurate sentiment analysis. To narrow our sentiment analysis even further, our team focused on critical State Farm events, specifically State Farm’s popular commercials during the Super Bowl. Our team wanted to find out what customers thought about State Farm before, during and after they viewed a State Farm commercial during the Super Bowl. Specifically, our team wanted to see if customers perception of State Farm would change for the better or worse after viewing one of their popular commercials, as well as if the commercial would overall positively benefit or negatively impact the company. The data our team collected is displayed using graphs created in R program and Python so that they can be easily presented to State Farm in the form of a website.
Our teams analysis during this critical event in the company's history shows when sentiment was high, indicating public opinion of State Farm was positive, and when sentiment was low, indicating that customers had a negative view of State Farm. This data is not only valuable to state Farm, as it allows them to focus on what customers enjoy about the company and change the negative aspects that customers do not like, but it is also valuable to the customer because the company is listening to what the customers are saying and can change their business model in order to more accurately fit the customers needs. Our website was created in order to showcase this customer sentiment towards State Farm.
