Universal Information Services

The world is talking about the choice to vaccinate. While there are those of us who are eager to get vaccinated and get back to some semblance of a normal life, there are individuals out there who have concerns about the vaccine. These people may be dragging their feet when it comes to getting vaccinated. This begs the questions:

• What is it that’s holding some people back, even as others feel relieved to get their shot?
• Why should you care how other people feel?

Let’s start with the second question first … why should you care how people feel or how people are talking about the COVID vaccine?

Well, if you’re a business owner, it is important to know what people are worried about concerning the vaccine if you hope to have everyone back in the office sooner than later. Knowing how people are talking about the vaccine can offer clues as to ways you can mitigate some of your employees’ primary fears. Maybe this means implementing specific cleaning procedures in your office, offering a staggered schedule or distanced work stations.

Now for that first question … what is it that’s keeping people from getting the vaccine?

It would take the lay person hours to cull every Twitter post out there that has anything to do with the COVID-19 vaccine. There are thousands of posts, so what’s a business or organization to do? Universal Information Services has an answer.

What we do: Measuring PR

Here at Universal, we are able to do both historic and real-time searches in social media to take a deeper dive into the sentiment and talk surrounding the COVID vaccine, among a multitude of other topics. We recently took an in-depth look into the Twitter conversation concerning the COVID vaccine over a two-week time period. In order to offer a fair comparison, we looked at two different post perspectives — one that was more fearful and one that was more confident.

The process

In order to narrow down the key themes, we used what’s known as word repetitions. As analytictech.com suggested, “if you want to understand what people are talking about, look at the words they use.” Words that occur a lot are often seen as being salient in the minds of respondents. We analyzed these terms informally and took the top two words for the pro versus con stance. From there, we built word clouds with the phrases or words that appeared most often in each of the two searches.

The results

In the infographic, you can see the volume of posts on each side was fairly even over the two-week period. Interestingly, the number of men and women engaged in conversations under each theme were about evenly split over that period, as well.

The word cloud under each primary theme shows the top words used in conversations about the COVID vaccine relative to each perspective. Demographic information and actual post reach is also included. Ultimately, what we found in our search is that though this data set offered information on two seemingly opposite views, they actually both used terms that could be taken any number of ways, both positively and negatively.

This brings me to another point: the importance of human coding. As evidenced above, a post focused on the COVID vaccine can be taken a number of ways. It’s important to look at the context surrounding these terms, as well as the sentiment and nuances of each message. This is something that a computer cannot do.

Here to help

At Universal, we read each post so we can accurately code for tone and sentiment. Need help looking at the conversation around your brand, campaign, goals or crisis? Set up a free consult with the team at Universal Information Services. We will provide you the numbers AND narrative you need! Leave a comment and let us know what strategies you use to form the most accurate measurements of your outreach efforts. We enjoy learning from others as much as helping others.