The global marketing value of social media influencers stood at $21.1 billion in 2023, illustrating just how powerful influencers are in today’s media environment. Of course, influencers don’t gain that level of market value by accident. Their ability to forge meaningful connections with audiences is crucial for delivering value to brand partnerships and building their own personal brand.
Of course, maintaining these relationships requires a fair amount of work in and of itself, with research indicating that influencers spend an average of over nine hours per day on their devices. From crafting content to engaging with brand partners and their audience, that level of screen time can quickly become overwhelming and lead to burnout and sub-par work.
This is where influencer-focused apps like Comb Insights are poised to make a difference. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Edward Rivers, co-founder and CEO, and James Webb, co-founder and CTO, to learn more about the tech their company offers to help influencers succeed.
Understanding Comment Sentiment
One of the main features of Comb Insights is its AI sentiment score.
As Rivers explains, “Our app’s proprietary AI goes through each of the comments on a Facebook or Instagram post and ranks it with a positive or negative sentiment score. The AI then provides an overall score that shows the percentage of positive comments versus neutral or negative comments. This provides near-instant analysis of the overall response to a particular post.”
The app also includes several additional features to help influencers better understand and evaluate the overall sentiment of comments on their posts. “Users can sort comments by their overall positivity score, generate word clouds that show the 40 words that appear most frequently in post comments, and even search or filter comments to look for specific words,” Rivers says.
“This allows influencers to quickly drill down into more detailed insights regarding what people are saying about a post, and how they feel about the influencer’s content in general.”
A rapid analysis of user comments can provide meaningful insights for influencers. For example, an influencer might initially discover that a post has a higher ratio of negative comments than most of their content. By sorting comments based on their positivity or negativity score and using a word cloud to see frequently used words, influencers could quickly identify patterns in why commenters disliked the content.
With such insights, influencers would be better positioned to pivot their content as needed to improve user reactions, ensuring continued engagement and audience growth. With instant insights into what their audience wants and how they respond to different types of content, influencers can consistently create higher-quality content.
Streamlining Work With Bulk Actions
Comb Insights’ bulk action capabilities are also poised to improve social media management for influencers by changing how they handle comments. “Going through comments one by one can become rather tedious,” Webb says.
“But with our app, you can select multiple comments to reply to or delete in bulk. This is a great way to handle comments that don’t require a more in-depth response, or to get rid of harmful or spam comments. It’s a simple feature, but one that can become a big time-saver for posts that get a lot of comments.”
The generally accepted best practice for social media comments is to respond as quickly as possible. In fact, 39% of social media users expect a response in less than one hour. Taking bulk actions on comments that don’t require as in-depth of a response can prove crucial for dealing with comments that require more thoughtful responses.
“You can still reply to comments individually through the app,” Webb notes. “But the ability to sort comments based on keywords or reply to similar comments in bulk makes it much easier to quickly craft an appropriate response as needed. Grouping similar comments together can also help spark ideas for how to personalize your responses in small, yet meaningful ways.”
Instead of taking the time to manually write out a generic “thank you” for dozens of comments, Comb Insights users could set up a bulk reply for selected comments, and then have more time to respond to comments that require a more complex response. The ability to provide more meaningful responses when needed can help audience members feel valued and make them more likely to continue to engage with the influencer in the future.
More Time for Meaningful Work
“Ultimately, the goal of our app is to ensure that influencers and businesses can quickly assess the audience response to each post, without having to spend so much time digging through graphs or reading individual comments,” Rivers says.
“By getting these helpful insights quickly, they can then devote more time to creating quality content that better appeals to their audience. Time is one of the most valuable resources any influencer can have, and by using these tools, they can be better equipped for success.”
By using AI-supported tools to streamline their work, influencers will be able to fine-tune their operations, improve post quality and more. In the long run, this can make all the difference in their ability to continually appeal to their audiences and grow their platform.
