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Sentiment Analysis: How Do People Feel About You On Twitter?

November 4th, 2009 (1:00pm) Dawn Foster 7 Comments

Do you know how people feel about you on Twitter? Are the tweets about you or your product mostly positive, negative or neutral? While things like feelings and sentiment can seem fuzzy and “touchy-feely,” there are sentiment analysis tools available for Twitter that attempt to classify tweets into either positive, negative or neutral categories automatically using algorithms and lists of keywords. For example, using words like “sucks,” “sad” and “hate” would be classified as negative, while “awesome,” “great” and “love” would be positive, with a neutral rating given to anything not falling into one of the other two categories. Read the rest of this entry »

Is Facebook Really Better Than Twitter For Your Business?

August 31st, 2009 (9:00am) Aliza Sherman 32 Comments

279226_boxing_gloves_and_dumbells_1There is no doubt that Facebook is the 900-pound gorilla in the world of social networks. But recently I read a post about Facebook being better than Twitter for business, and I don’t think that’s always true. Granted, I recommend Facebook Pages to my clients, swoon over Facebook’s Social Ads program and am grateful for the information I can gain from Facebook’s Insights. However, the most important things to think about when utilizing social media for business are:

  1. What are your business goals? What are you trying to achieve?
  2. Who are you trying to reach? Where are they talking?
  3. Where are the conversations happening around your company or brand? How can you appropriately join the conversation?

In a direct fight between Twitter and Facebook for business — which is challenging, because Facebook and Twitter are two distinctly different kinds of tools with different functionality — I can’t say that Facebook always wins. Let’s take a look. Read the rest of this entry »

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