What is the Scraping Web Data for Sentiment Analysis & How it Helps Marketers and Data Scientists

What is the Scraping Web Data for Sentiment Analysis & How it Helps Marketers and Data Scientists
Posted
Sep 13, 2022

Brand success or failure doesn't just depend on sales volume, which can change in a short period of time it also depends on customer opinion (or sentiment). Sentiment can be learned by listening to how potential customers talk about the brand, whether they bought the product or not.

Sentiment analysis is a term everyone knows today, but not everyone fully understands this class of data analysis methods and how to use it. The use of sentiment analysis tools in business benefits not only companies but also their customers by allowing them to improve products and services, identify the strengths and weaknesses of competitors' products, and create targeted advertising.

What is Sentiment Analysis?

Sentiment analysis is a natural language processing (NLP) technique that is used to determine the polarity of emotional evaluations in the text under study, which contains: 

  • opinions;
  • judgments;
  • emotions;
  • author's attitudes toward entities, personalities, issues, events, themes, and their attributes. 

In lay terms, tone analysis answers the question, "How does the author of the text feel about the topic at hand?" The author's attitude can be positive, negative, or neutral.

Tone analysis identifies words and expressions in a text that have positive, negative, or neutral connotations. People recognize the tone of a text not only on the basis of linguistic knowledge but also on the basis of the social context. 

Computers have learned to recognize linguistic patterns easily, but if the interpretation of the tone of a text depends heavily on the context, the accuracy of such analysis performed by a machine is not yet guaranteed. 

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Why is Sentiment Analysis Important?

With the advent of social media, sentiment analysis has become the primary methodology used to identify customer attitudes toward products and services. Companies use this information to improve their products. You can imagine the benefits of sentiment analysis when you realize that it allows you to summarize the content of millions of user reviews of product quality in real-time. 

This technique has long been used to analyze responses to open-ended questions. However, such data is difficult to collect and usually not much, unlike the feedback that millions of users voluntarily post on social media. This data, which is freely available online, can also be processed by sentiment analysis tools and used in business intelligence.

Competitive Intelligence

In order to run a successful business, it is important not only to see the strengths and weaknesses of your own products and services through the eyes of a company's customers but also to understand how the competitors are doing. Companies can change certain characteristics of their products if competitive intelligence finds that competitors' customers like those characteristics. Negative attitudes of competitors' customers toward their products can also affect the strategic decision-making process.   

Market Research

It is important for companies to know what customers like and what could and should be improved. This information will help decide what products or services to continue selling and what needs to be promoted in the marketplace. If one company sells its products through other companies, it can analyze customer feedback to identify shortcomings of individual sellers or find new dealers. 

Advertising

Modern advertising often uses customer reviews to promote products or services. Tone analysis can identify positive feedback from their customers, which can be used for promotional purposes and to show that their products can be trusted. In addition, the data obtained can be used to present their products favorably in relation to similar products of competitors by identifying their shortcomings.

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How Does Sentiment Analysis Work?

Sentiment analysis is a mixture of different modules, methods, and technical concepts. Two major deployments on the sentiment analysis spectrum include NLP and machine learning. One helps with opinions, and the other trains or performs certain actions to extract insights from those opinions. Depending on the amount of data, you can deploy one of the three sentiment analysis modules. 

Rule-based

Here you can manually define a rule for your model to perform sentiment analysis on the data you have. This model includes the integration of NLP concepts such as lexicons, tokenization, syntactic analysis, and more. Here, words are assigned a value - good for positive words and bad for negative. The model counts the number of positive and negative words in the text and then classifies the sentiment.

In this method, however, instances of sarcasm can be passed off as good opinions, distorting the overall functionality of sentiment analysis. 

Automatic

This aspect of sentiment analysis runs entirely on machine learning algorithms. The automatic model implements a classifier that evaluates the text and returns results. This includes many data tags and data annotations to help models understand the data they are loading.

Hybrid

Hybrid approaches, the most accurate of models, combine the best of both worlds, rule-based and automatic. They are more accurate, more functional, and preferred by companies for their sentiment analysis campaigns.

Sources to Getting Data from a Sentiment Analysis

There are many useful sources from which to gather relevant data for sentiment analysis. For example, news, social media, customer feedback, emails, and more.

Social Media

You can gather information from social media from platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and others. For detailed sentiment analysis on social networks, relevant information can be extracted from both comments and videos.

Review Sites

You can pull data for customer sentiment analysis not only from social media but also from comments and consumer reviews on review sites like Google, Demandforce, Clutch, etc. To avoid wasting a bunch of time, you can choose sites specific to your industry. For example, if you're in a travel firm, you'll gather data from Expedia, TripAdvisor, etc., Yelp if you own a local business like a restaurant, or Indeed and Glassdoor if you want employee reviews.

Surveys

Surveys allow you to get to know your customers or employees better. Surveys can be sent via email, communities, chat rooms, or messengers. Open, anonymous questions help people to express themselves more freely, so you can conduct more accurate analyses based on the honest feedback.

Podcasts

Podcasts are another great source of data for analyzing the sentiments of various types of users on different situations, occasions, and topics. Some platforms for podcasts include Buzzsprout, Podbean, Spotify, Audible, and Google Podcasts.

News Articles & Videos

Articles and videos from news sites are good sources of data for analyzing business needs, especially for monitoring brand reputation. Political unrest, financial reports, and market summaries all have a significant impact. A company can gather all the relevant videos and news to analyze them using AI.

Gaming Video Platforms

Gaming platforms like Twitch are sources for gathering information regarding games and technology for hardware companies like manufacturers of monitors, keyboards, computer desks, etc. Analyzing sentiment analysis data from such platforms can give companies insight into how players feel about games, genres, and upcoming releases, and brands can gain experiential insight into users for targeted advertising campaigns.

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Ways to Collect Data for Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis allows you to look at your business from the customer's perspective. Let's see how you can extract this knowledge from user data.

  • Using web scrapers that collect specific data from a huge number of web pages. They can extract information from various sources, such as news articles, reviews, or comments, bypass blockers, and collect content in a different format, such as HTML or JSON. One of the most effective ways is because you will not only get up-to-date data, but you will also gather it from different places instead of just one, which increases the likelihood of more accurate analysis and creating better business solutions.
  • You can use the API provided by a particular platform to collect data in streaming mode. For example, Twitter has an API for retrieving tweets by hashtags, and the News API allows you to retrieve news by category. Not a bad way, but it only allows you to collect data from one place where there is an API, which wastes a lot of your time searching for data sources and extracting them.
  • Using existing open-source data repositories where all the data is already collected. However, this approach has a huge disadvantage - user sentiment, just like data, changes and supplements every day. Therefore, it is best to use those tools that allow you to collect up-to-date information, rather than relying on outdated data for analysis.

Read more about Web Scraping: How to Generate Business Leads Using Web Scraping

How to Scrape Data from a Website for Sentiment Analysis?

Before you can analyze user sentiment and make certain conclusions, you first need to collect all the data you need to do the analysis. Collecting a huge number of comments, reviews and feedback manually is very complex, even if several people perform it. There is an easier way to gather information for sentiment analysis - web scraping. This is an automated procedure for collecting a huge amount of information from the Internet about any subject. There are several web scraping options that you can choose:

  • Order web scraping services from a service provider
  • Use special off-the-shelf data collection tools
  • Create your own web scraper

The latter option is too resource-intensive and time-consuming. You will need to hire an experienced professional to create a scraper. Or learn how to scrape yourself. So the fastest and most reliable ways are the first two.

If you need comments on every post or feedback on every video/application, a ready-made scraper will collect all the data and provide it in the right format. The advantage of a web scraper for sentiment analysis is a time and money saver for the researcher. It is worth remembering that the scraper does not recognize users' emotions in the data, it just collects the content itself for research and is only the first step in your journey.

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Final Thoughts

Any company that wants to grow expects feedback and wishes to hear all of the consumers' thoughts, both good and bad. Sentiment analysis enables companies to use vast amounts of free data to understand customer needs and attitudes toward their brand, thereby activating consumers to keep leaving feedback. 

Consider these steps if you decide to use sentiment analysis in your business:

  • collect feedback data;
  • make sure the data is of sufficient quality for analysis;
  • use scraping to collect data;
  • hire a data analytics team if you're in a specific industry, such as health care, finance, or transportation.

Take full advantage of data scraping and the positive results of sentiment analysis, and you'll have the highest quality data sets for accurate results. But don't take my word for it, scrape, analyze and watch.

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