There is a considerable amount of data that is generated every day. According to estimates by the International Data Corporation (IDC), less than one percent of this data is actually analyzed. Furthermore, the IDC indicates that an incredible amount of data has been created over the past few years. As a result, they state that by 2020, the digital universe will consist of more than 40 ZB. This translates as roughly 1.7 MB of new data being created by every person every second.
Since just one percent of data has been analyzed, the IDC recommends text mining to address the remaining 99%. Text mining software can assist businesses in three significant ways:
- By providing more accurate insights across a broader spectrum of documents and sources
- By providing accurate risk, compliance, and threat detection
- By improving customer engagement through natural language processing
When customer engagement is improved, businesses have a greater capacity to generate early insights into what their customers are thinking. This is referred to as sentiment analysis. Opinion mining is also part of this process, as is emotion AI and aspect based sentiment analysis, which directly relates to natural language processing.
Given the prevalence of social media monitoring, for example, businesses and related enterprises are able to understand their customers’ and clients’ perspectives, or opinions, about their company, its products, and/or its competitors. When natural language processing is utilized, it can provide vital insights into what these individuals may think or believe.
There are four basic steps to the text mining process:
- Information retrieval
- Natural language processing
- Information extraction
- Data mining
After these steps have been performed with text mining software, businesses will have a clearer picture of the attitudes, feelings, and opinions of their existing and/or potential customers. When considering that Facebook alone has about 1.97 billion global users that are active on a monthly basis, this generates a significant amount of data every second. Since social media users often post reviews on sites such as Facebook, these provide valuable information.
Even though Facebook is one of the social media sites that experiences a considerable amount of traffic and generates an overwhelming amount of data, it is not the only social media site that receives this level of activity. Since businesses want to succeed, a vital tool to accomplish this goal is to learn more about sentiment analysis for brand reputation and other relevant information.