Counting social media followers is a lot like sitting at a bar and counting the tops from the bottles of beer you’ve drunk. All this tells you is how many beers you’ve had; it tells you nothing about the quality of the conversation, how good the music was, or the general entertainment of the evening. It doesn’t provide the overall context of the experience.

This was the analogy put forward by Robin Meisel, of RGT Smart, at the ITWeb Business Intelligence Summit.

According to Meisel, social media analysis is shifting away from mention counting and sentiment analysis towards understanding the importance of context, and this is achieved through linguistic analysis.

Social media analytics, said Meisel, is concerned with sentiment analysis (positive, negative, neutral), influencers, etc. Linguistic analysis, he said, uses insight to gain information on the drivers.

When analysing social media, linguistics looks at function words and conjunctions (the, and, of, because, etc), which provide insight on the structure of the sentence. One can also incur demographics from this. Linguistics also looks at punctuation – the older and more educated people are, the better their punctuation is. Punctuation is also very important in terms of providing context (Really? vs Really!), he said. Verbs, cognition, biological functions, motion, space and time, and phraseology also play a role in linguistic analysis.

The use of pronouns is telling, said Meisel. “The use of first-person pronouns implies the individual is taking ownership and is likely being truthful.”

He concluded by summarising the structure of linguistic analysis to include: summation and adding (followers, mentions), sentiment analysis, language and linguistics (to aid in understanding), psychological analysis and brand measures.

He again cautioned not to rely only on mentions, followers and sentiment analysis, as these lack the context that is critical to understanding meaning.