How Viralheat Uses Social Mentions to Track Sentiment and Brand Personas

By Karen Fratti 

viralheatlogoIt’s one thing to know that people are talking about your brand or content on social media. It’s another to know how they feel about it and what else they want. That’s what Viralheat, a social media marketing and analytics platform, wants to know.

They process over 1.5 billion social mentions a day and using their algorithms, are able to decipher sentiment and brand affinity. Recently, they put their data and process to work for Variety magazine, who’s using it to power vScore, which measures an actor’s value based on the sentiment around them on social media. Here’s how they put it:

Vscore’s searchable database rates each actor from 1 to 100, and allows the user to generate lists based on age, gender and ethnicity. Each actor’s listing includes representative contact details along with past work experience in TV and film, ratings and box office, social mentions, verified Twitter and Facebook pages, upcoming projects and awards nominations and wins. Vscore also suggests actors who have auditioned for the same roles, giving subscribers an instant casting list.

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It’s “pretty powerful stuff,” Viralheat’s CEO Jeff Revoy told me over the phone. “I probably make it sound easy, but sentiment is hard to do. We opened up our sentiment engine API and its all machine learning. It gets smarter with all these people using it and constantly improves itself based on feedback.”

Not only can Viralheat put a sentiment value on Johnny Depp’s head, but they also help brands figure out consumers’ “brand persona.” They know you’re watching the “Walking Dead,” tweeting about it, and then they process your other social actiovity to find out what else you like. You can see in the infographic below that fans of “Gotham” also tend to talk about PBS, Tyson, and Nascar. Who knew?

Revoy explains that it’s two-fold for advertisers. They aren’t just looking at your brand affinity, but they also know when you’re talking about it. That’s a powerful package for advertisers looking to buy television spots or run digital campaigns.

Here’s a new infographic from Viralheat tracking the brand personas of “Gotham” and “Flash” fans:

Viralheat_Brand_Affinity_Infographic

 

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