As businesses increasingly rely on social media to communicate with potential customers, they need to be aware of any discussions revolving around their brands or products. Text annotation is helping companies monitor social media for such discussions. By tracking these conversations, companies can identify potential problems and concerns early on and respond swiftly and effectively to maintain positive customer sentiment.
However, this can be difficult to do manually by in-house resources, who may lack expertise, particularly when the discussion is spread across a large number of platforms. Therefore businesses nowadays are constantly in need of assistance from professional text annotation services providers to improve their social media presence. Expert services offer solutions to this problem by allowing companies to automatically identify and track discussions around their brands or products on a variety of social media platforms.
This information can then be used to determine which products are being received well by consumers and which need further attention. By monitoring these discussions, businesses can ensure that they communicate effectively with their audience and make the most of growth opportunities.
How Can Text Annotation Help in Regulating Social Media Noise?
The popularity of social media has driven content creation from all quarters of society. While this has democratized the ability to disseminate content to large audiences, it has also led to the creation of content that may be of poor quality.
While what constitutes poor quality may change according to the viewer’s tastes, certain pillars of quality apply to businesses. It helps discern what data is valuable to them and what isn’t. The latter part is considered noise, and text annotation has emerged as a promising candidate to eliminate this noise in social media data for several reasons.
1. Identifying and Tracking Patterns in Social Media Post
Through text annotation, you can easily identify important information in a text and filter out the noise. This process involves marking text with labels, allowing you to identify important words and phrases. This information can then be used to identify and categorize the topics discussed in social media posts. This way, you can gain insights into trends and issues that are relevant to your business and adjust your strategies accordingly.
Another benefit of this is the ability to identify patterns in discrete text data snippets that helps to interconnect them and derive more meaning from them as a result. These individual pieces of data may remain isolated and, thus, not be exploited to their full potential if not for a text annotation process applied to them.
2. Identifying and Understanding the Tone of the Text
When it comes to social media, companies need to be aware of the tone of their posts to stay in compliance with regulations. It is also important to propagate brand voice, as all marketing collateral should adhere to a set brand tone, regardless of platform.
One way to combat social noise in the form of tone deviations is through text annotation. By using text annotation techniques, companies can train a machine to track the tone of their posts and identify when there is a shift in sentiment. Text annotation can help identify and classify sentiment in social media posts, helping companies understand how their brand is perceived by customers and address any negative sentiment. This can help them take corrective action before any negative fallout occurs, such as receiving backlash for being tone-deaf or providing confusing brand voice tones across different platforms.
3. Providing Critical Customer Feedback
One way text annotation has been used so far is in customer service by annotating social media posts to help identify any negative or positive sentiments that may be present. Since text annotation can capture both positive and negative sentiments, it can be extremely helpful in providing feedback to company representatives.
This information can help them understand how their interactions are being received by customers and make changes accordingly. Additionally, it can help identify any areas of improvement in customer service.
What Are the Different Techniques of Text Annotation?
When it comes to annotating text, there are a variety of different techniques that can be used, some of which are discussed below:
1. Entity Annotation
The creation of reliable training datasets for chatbots and other NLP-based platforms uses entity annotation. This type of annotation has several variations, including:
a. Part-of-speech tagging
When it comes to sentences, digital assistants can understand them better when there is a clear definition for the different types of sentence frames. That’s exactly what part-of-speech tagging does. It helps digital assistants identify language and how sentence framing functions within it.
b. Named entity recognition
The task of identifying named entities in text, such as persons, locations, and items, is dealt with named entity recognition (NER). Named entity recognition systems can be used for a variety of purposes, such as searching for specific pieces of information, indexing text, and parsing natural language. This helps in accurately tagging entities, leading to a better customer experience and faster responses.
2. Intent Annotation
For many different kinds of automated systems, being able to discern a customer’s speech intent is essential. People might experience frustration or, worse yet, not get the service they were hoping for if it is not successfully identified. Because of this, these systems must have an annotator who can comprehend what their users are trying to say.
3. Sentiment Annotation
Sentiment annotation is critical for any business that wants to know what its customers are saying about it online. It allows companies to discern whether a sentiment is positive, neutral, or negative and make decisions accordingly. With the right data, businesses can identify trends and make informed decisions.
4. Linguistic Annotation
Linguistic annotation is a process of assessing nuances like natural pauses, stress, intonations, and more within audio or textual datasets to create accurate tags. This approach is especially important for training machine learning based translation models and virtual/voice assistants.
Why Should You Outsource Text Annotation Services?
Text annotation is a common practice in the field of social media, but it can be difficult for inexperienced employees in-house to do. Outsourcing the task to a professional text annotation service providing agency can make a world of difference to your company due to the following benefits you get.
1. Efficient Resource Consumption
One of the biggest factors that contribute to the reduction of ROI when performing text annotation in-house is the drain on company resources it will have. Text annotation, like other types of data annotation, is a complex process; therefore, you’ll need to allocate a lot of manpower and budget for it. This is something that even large businesses can struggle with, leaving smaller pens out of contention in the market due to their lack of adequate resources.
Outsourcing is the best workaround for this resource problem by virtue of the economies of scale and large in-house talent pools they tend to possess. If based in a developing country, then you also tend to get the advantage of currency exchange values bringing down your project costs. Their onboarding of multiple clients evens out the upfront money you have to use for the process.
The large talent pool will contain experienced professionals who can get the work done quickly. This experience gets combined with the large numbers to give you quick turnaround times, a factor that fundamentally determines how well you can manage the large volumes of social media data you will be adding to your database constantly.
The combination of quickness of results without compromising on the accuracy and the massive reduction in costs will expedite your internal operations, leading to a more efficient organization setup.
2. Increasing Online Visibility
Social media sites contain microcosms of people that share a common interest and need that your brand can target. By going with a professional text annotation services agency, you get the expertise you need to identify and better target these microcosms with your brand messaging. Adding to this is the fact that the professionals at the agency will be able to derive meaningful information from the metadata. It provides your marketing with the added ability to fine-tune every upload for maximum visibility on every site.
3. Storing Useful Data
Expert text annotators are well-versed in storing valuable data so that it is easily accessible by business owners and employees. This data can be used for research purposes, tracking customer trends, or compiling sales statistics. In short, outsourcing text annotation services can save businesses time and money while helping them to stay organized and efficient in their operations.
4. Rapid Scaling
Scaling can quickly backfire if it’s not done in a planned manner. This goes for your company’s data management as well. Adding more personnel to manage the ever-increasing quantities of social media-derived data isn’t always feasible, leading to bottlenecks across your operational bandwidth.
Outsourcing text annotation for the reduction of social media noise counteracts the detrimental effects that accompany scaling by providing rapid and accurate results always. The outsourcing agency will be equipped with the resources to handle the extra data load that comes to their doorstep each time you expand your company’s operations.
5. Easy Multi-annotation Combination
Social media is not just about the text; there are plenty of images and audio data segments to handle as well for true data intelligence. Text annotation alone won’t suffice in such a scenario. It needs to work with image and audio annotation to help you discern the complete picture of the concept the data represents.
This means having to onboard dedicated personnel for the other types of annotation as well as for text annotation if you’re conducting things in-house. Outsourcing saves you that trouble as the agency is likely to provide image and audio annotation alongside text annotation.
Take Away
The world has taken to social media like fish takes to water and has made it the de facto means of communication. By containing such large quantities of user data, social media sites are also important data well for businesses looking to leave a mark in their target market. But when data scraped from such sites doesn’t match up to the quality needed for business purposes, AI-based technologies can step in and step up the data cleaning process. Text annotation plays a critical role here by eliminating unwanted data from the scraped social media data in your database. By picking a viable text annotation service provider, you enhance that process and get additional benefits that can make your company the pick of the pack in the market for your customers.
