Emotions play a vital role in our daily lives by influencing how we feel, think and behave, and play a big part in the decisions we make. We use emotions to express our feelings, make decisions and drive conversations.
Therefore, detecting emotions from online content or other means is a useful thing to do as it can have many practical applications in sectors such as marketing, industry, health and security.
There is an increased interest in social media monitoring to analyse user-generated text from social media sites. Clearly, social media is an invaluable resource, hence organisations would want to use it to gain insights into understanding customers opinions, concerns and needs about their products and services.
Emotion classification has many use interesting cases, here we present some of these:
Marketing
Many social media users follow one or more brands, so it is fertile ground full of marketing opportunities and can help to spread awareness of a brand, generate leads, drive traffic to sites, build a customer base and more.
Stock markets
Social media has been used to try to anticipate trends in financial markets with self-regulating bots making trades and predicting trends.
Social studies
Millions of people regularly interact with the world online, providing invaluable insights into their feelings, emotions and behaviour. An increasingly popular approach to make use of this vast amount of public communication is to generate forecasts of various types of events. For example, large-scale social media data analysis has shown that posting powerful and emotional messages is effective in social media.
Improving customer service
Due to its real-time nature Twitter has carved out a niche as being at the sharp end of social customer support. It is one of the main places where brands who fail their customers come under the most vocal and sustained attack. Consequently, companies have discovered that Twitter can be a fast route to better customer relationships, to keep customers in the loop, to help direct them to appropriate resources and to get them involved in improving products and services. Emotion classification can also help marketers gain information about customer satisfaction levels and what aspects of their services need be improved or revised.
Heathcare
Psychologists are able to use patients’ emotions to predict their state of mind and intervene if a patient is facing depression, stress or having suicidal thoughts.