How to track customer sentiment online with Bing News Search API and Text Analytics API

Nothing is more important than your reputation. The old adage has never been more true with our reputations largely being formed by our presence online. For brands, this goes two-fold. The reputation of a business or organization is built from several factors—search results, social media mentions, and customer reviews. How we show up in search results impacts how we are perceived by the world. We work and live within a pull economy where people, customers, and employers are looking for you online. And when they find you, their decision to purchase, connect, or move on is ultimately based on your reputation.

In a world where how you show up on search is key to how you are perceived, reputation management has become a function of monitoring and analyzing what your customers are saying about you online and in person. With the goal of building trust and maintaining positive control over your brand’s reputation, there are many tools available to help with just that. There are tools that can monitor social media mentions, compare you to your competitors, notify you whenever your brand is referenced online, understand sentiment, and much more. With such a vast landscape of content out there, both positive and negative about your brand, keeping up can feel like a daunting task.

Reputation Management with Bing News Search API

Bing News Search can serve as a powerful data provider to help you track and manage public sentiment about you, an organization, or brand. A Bing News Search pointed at a company’s own name can populate an internal dashboard with new or trending news content regarding that group. Also, News Search can be pointed outward to help you track your competitors’ latest releases or initiatives.

With the Bing News Search API, you can extract headlines and excerpts from articles and return them in the response, making it easier to scan and track the content in an article, and much easier to build additional tools that leverage that data stream.

How to track sentiment

Tracking sentiment online can be done quickly with the help of Bing News Search as one of the tools in your reputation management toolkit. Search for news about businesses, people, and products that you care about and then use text analytics to programmatically detect sentiment of articles, social media mentions, and more.

For example, in the screenshot below, there are a couple of headlines that came back when we searched for news about “Microsoft” that we can check:

  • “Microsoft's popular Halo Xbox games are coming to the PC”
  • “Microsoft to start nagging users in April about the January 2020 Windows 7 end-of-support deadline”
Bing News Search Example
 

Using the Text Analytics API, also available via Cognitive Services, we can take those headlines and quickly detect sentiment that is returned as a numeric score, ranging from 0% (negative) to 100% (positive). See our results below:

Positive Sentiment Score (93%) - “Microsoft's popular Halo Xbox games are coming to the PC”

Text Analytics Example - Positive Sentiment

Neutral Sentiment Score (50%) – “Microsoft to start nagging users in April about the January 2020 Windows 7 end-of-support deadline”

Text Analytics Example - Neutral Sentiment

Tracking mentions and gauging sentiment to help manage perception can be done just like that.

To learn more about Bing News Search API and Text Analytics API, go to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/.

 - Bing APIs Team