Go Beyond Engagement with Sentiment

If you're using social media to connect with your audience, you're probably familiar with metrics like likes, comments, and shares.  

But here's the thing - those metrics only tell part of the story. We can see how many people are engaging with our posts, but we still don’t understand if these engagements are positive or negative. By engagement standards alone, sad or angry comments and reactions measure just the same as happy or positive ones – so you could think a post was performing well when it was actually harmful for your brand!  

So how do you know if those engagements are positive or negative?  

Measuring sentiment – not just engagement – helps us understand our audience better.  

The Zavy sentiment score is calculated based on the comments on each post. It measures ‘net Sentiment’: the number of positive comments minus the number of negative ones. This measure ranges from -100% to +100% and is calculated only for posts with more than two comments.

Zavy users are given a sentiment score on each post. This score tells you how this post made your audience feel – are the comments happy and supportive? Or sad, angry or frustrated? Consistently high sentiment scores mean your audience is responding positively to your content, whereas consistently low sentiment is a strong signal you need to make some changes.  

Zavy users can also benefit from Radar, Zavy’s social listening add-on tool. Radar tracks sentiment and emotions across any topic – just enter it and you’ll see how people are feeling, including what trending posts are the top influencers of that feeling.  

Zavy users can compare their automatically calculated sentiment scores with our benchmarks to see how they measure up to industry competitors.

Not a Zavy user? If you’ve used our Zavy Benchmarks Calculator or downloaded our Social Content Benchmarks Report, but you’re not onboard with us just yet, you can calculate sentiment manually. Simply tally up the number of positive comments on a post and then subtract the number of negative ones to reach a sentiment score for each post. You will need to do this for several posts to be able to track trends, understand sentiment by channel or assess your average sentiment across all content.  

Want your sentiment scores done for you? Get in touch at hello@zavy.co