Growing up, you were probably told to keep your opinions to yourself — at least once. Or maybe, at least many many times. Sharing your opinion is a natural tendency, as you likely tend to form pretty strong opinions about certain topics. You want to discuss these with others — and, hopefully, do so with the knowledge that not everyone will agree with you.

In today’s tech-savvy environment, people are sharing opinions more than ever. The internet allows us to not only express our opinions with tons of strangers — far more people than we typically see in our daily lives — but it allows us to use a veil of anonymity and feel secure when expressing these opinions. This means that we’re sharing opinions with more people than ever, and feeling more secure while doing it

As people continue to create posts online, expressing their opinions, more and more text-based data is generated. Yet, so much of that data will never be analyzed. With a predicted near three billion social media users for 2018, huge amounts of data and information will be created every day. It’s important for businesses — big or small — to be sure to use this information to their advantage.

But how can this knowledge help your business be more successful?

Currently, only about 1% of data is every analyzed. However, with text mining software, such as sentiment analysis software (also known as opinion mining), we can bridge this gap! To help your business, you can use such software to analyze what consumers are saying about your product or service on the internet. Sure, you can easily see reviews on sites like Google or Yelp — but, haven’t you ever wondered what the millions of Twitter and Facebook users are saying? Social media data analysis can help you mine through all of that information and pull out the most important bits to help you create a business plan around it.

Here are three ways that text mining helps businesses:

1. Accurate Insights. Text mining, such as sentiment analysis software, looks through a broad range of sources. Including documents and other online sources, this tool can help you make accurate inferences about what people think of your product or service, and how you can continually improve it to increase sales.
2. Risk Detection. Text analytics in social media, for example, can help you determine an accurate idea of any potential risks or threats. Because you can gain such a huge insight into public opinion, you can help your business avoid these risks or improve on any problems that may lead to such threats.
3. Improved Customer Engagement. Natural language processing can help you to better understand what people are saying about your company or product. As a result, you can not only accurately predict any risks or threats, but also what you people love about your company. In other words, you can see what customers are thinking for early insights into any future decisions. And customers will love it, as they’ll feel that their opinions are being heard!

Sentiment analysis software can be incredibly beneficial to the success of your company. With various tools offered by such companies, including entity extraction, you’ll be swimming in information. So, be sure to follow the four steps in text-mining process to avoid becoming overwhelmed:

1. Information Retrieval
2. Natural Language Processing
3. Information Extraction
4. Data Mining

If you follow these steps with sentiment analysis software, you’ll be on your way to a better understanding of your consumers — and an improved business practice!