Page 20 - Barrow Town Deal Board Agenda 14/4/2020

Barrow Town Investment Plan - Stakeholder Insight Report

2. Community Sentiment

2.1 This section of the report explores current sentiment in Barrow-in-Furness drawing on
digital engagement findings including online activity which references the town through the
Meltwater AI tool, in addition to analysis of comments posted on the #mytowns page. This
digital engagement provides some early insight into positive and negative views of the town
which will be supported by more direct engagement through the course of developing the
Town Investment Plan.

Online Engagement Sentiment

2.2 Hatch Regeneris have analysed social media activity relating to Barrow by filtering data
provided by Meltwater AI based on the term ‘Barrow-in-Furness’ and the hashtag ‘#Barrow-
in-Furness’. Meltwater AI classified around 12,000 individual online posts from 2019 into
sentiment categories of Positive, Neutral, Negative and Not Rated.
2.3 Based on this classification, a substantial majority of Barrow-related online activity is of
neutral sentiment – a total of over 7,390 posts (61.6% of all classified), whilst 2% of posts
were not able to be given a sentiment rating. This is followed by a significant portion of
negative sentiment (just under 3,440 posts - 28.6%). Lastly, online activity concerning
Barrow of a positive sentiment makes up just less than 8% of total online activity related to
Barrow.

Figure 2.1 Share of Barrow-related Social Figure 2.2 Share of Barrow-related Social
Media Activity by Sentiment (all), 2019 Media Activity by Sentiment (positive vs
negative), 2019

Data source: Meltwater AI Data source: Meltwater AI

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