Repustate is now a part of Sprout Social. Read the press release here

Gain valuable insights into what your customers are saying.

Book a 15-minute demo
Join leading companies using Repustate

What is opinion mining?

To put it simply, Opinion Mining is the use of Text Analytics and other natural language processing techniques to understand how people think of a variety of different topics. An opinion is a view or judgment about something or someone like a politician, public policy, celebrity, or a new law and Opinion Mining uses Text Analytics to identify, extract, and analyze opinions buried deep in unstructured text.

Because an opinion is a belief based on fact, logic, intuition, or speculation and can be found in a variety of text, companies should look just as closely at this as they would Sentiment Analysis. When your customers are expressing precisely how they feel about a brand in their social media posts, product reviews, call center transcripts, or survey response, Opinion Mining can tell you a lot about what your customers want from your brand and what they expect from you in the future. Opinion Mining can be the very tool that helps you get that leg up on your competition by providing more insights about your customer base than ever before.

Opinion Mining is especially useful to public relations, politics, and brand insights. This tool is often used interchangeably with sentiment analysis but they are very different from each other.

How is Opinion Mining different from Sentiment Analysis?

Although they use similar text analytics techniques, the difference between Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis is that Opinion Mining deals with thoughts while sentiment analysis concerns itself with feelings. With Opinion Mining, you are searching for semantic phrases like: “in my opinion”, “to my mind”, “as far as I'm concerned”, “from my point of view”, etc. On the other hand, Sentiment Analysis looks for the feelings expressed toward a brand, company, or person using a variety of words such as love, hate, upset, cheated, etc.

In order to have the most robust customer insights, companies need to understand both the feelings and opinions of their current and future consumers. It helps if your company uses a platform that was built for social media and is programmed to understand hashtags, slang, and industry jargon in several different languages.

How is opinion mining done?

The common denominator between understanding the difference between a piece of text that expresses a feeling and one that expresses an opinion and how it is deciphered is by using Semantic Analysis. Semantically, the manner in which people express their ideas is different from how they speak of their feelings.

Repustate uses a variety of natural language processing tools to identify opinions in text, extract them, and then visualize them through an insights dashboard for the quick and easy summary, analysis, and reporting of your customers' and prospect's opinions and feelings. Repustate simplifies the process of understanding what your customers are trying to say by building a comprehensive and actionable consumer profile based on real-time sentiment and opinion analysis.

Some of these techniques include Named Entity Recognition, Semantic Search, and Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis.

What are the applications of opinion mining software?

Here are the most impactful applications of opinion mining:

Product Improvement

Opinion Mining tool is used to gather valuable information from your customers. This can be instrumental in guiding merchandise improvements to your products and services. Also, use these insights for future product development based on your customer's opinions and sentiments, staying ahead of trends in your space as well.

Gauge Public Opinion

For many industries, it is essential to understand public opinion globally on various topics to strategically guide the manner in which to proceed. Governments must also know what citizens think about proposed new laws and policies in order to guide future endeavors. Without a good Opinion Mining tool, it would be close to impossible to gauge the true sentiments of your constituents.

Gain a Competitive Edge

Understand your customers and potential consumers better than your competition. This allows you to target them more effectively with messaging, advertising, and promotions that will gauge their interest faster than your competitors can. Know what customers want to see before your competition does, and adjust your stock and products accordingly.

With Repustate's Opinion Mining and natural language processing techniques, gain valuable insights into what your customers are really saying. Dive deeper than just the surface level and watch your business or brand flourish.