Top 10 Sentiment Analysis Tools for Social Media

Is it possible to monitor, understand and use to your advantage the sentiment behind millions of conversations taking place on social media? 

With the help of advanced social media sentiment analysis tools and best-practices it is! Understanding the emotion behind every comment, like, and share on your brand's posts is very important. In this article, we’ll take a deeper dive to understand what sentiment analysis is, along with a list of tools you can use.

Social media is a goldmine for marketing research for any business. If you’re putting efforts into building a presence on social media, there will naturally be some buzz. But how do you know if it’s good or bad for your brand? 

Simply put, social media sentiment measures people’s feelings or thoughts towards a particular brand or individual. It analyzes and tracks your vibe on social media to present social media data that can be used to improve your strategy and enhance performance. 

What is sentiment analysis on social media?

Studies show 59% of the global population actively uses the internet. With such a massive number of people present online, it’s natural that most interactions happen virtually. 

But one of the biggest concerns of text-based communication is the inability to see or hear the people you’re interacting with, leading to making assumptions about the audience.

This is a bigger problem for brands looking to build and boost their digital presence. 

An excellent solution for this is sentiment analysis on social media.

Social media sentiment analysis gives you a clear understanding of what people feel about your brand. Primarily, it collects all information people share about your brand on any social media platform and analyzes the same. It studies the emotions, intent, and thoughts behind every text.

Why does social media sentiment analysis matter?

Whether you want to analyze your brand mentions, customer feedback, or study the responses to your latest announcement—social media sentiment analysis can help you significantly. Here are some reasons why sentiment analysis can make or break the deal for you.

• Brand health: A key benefit of analyzing social media sentiment lies in understanding your brand position. It gives you an insight into your customers’ thoughts and needs.
• Competitive edge: Another good use of sentiment analysis is to evaluate your competitors and see what’s working and not working for them.
• Monitor and manage: With sentiment analysis, you have the tools to not only stay alert at all times but also to direct your efforts into damage control whenever needed.
• Customer experience: Knowing what your customers like and dislike can help you channelize your efforts in the right direction and deliver better experiences.
• Strategizing: Depending on the reactions of your audience, you can develop more focused strategies to address the bad and develop the good. 

What are sentiment analysis tools?

Now that you know how crucial social media sentiment analysis is and how it can improve your digital presence—let’s see how you can start using it.

Sentiment analysis tools run on Big Data and Machine Learning technologies. These tools interpret different forms of text on social media and focus on finding the intent and emotion behind the text.

These tools present a clear picture of positive or negative public sentiment towards your brand—motivating you to improve your strategy and get a better idea about your social media performance.

How to choose a sentiment analysis tool?

Like most other products in the market, sentiment analysis tools also exist in massive numbers. Here are some factors that can help determine the best tool for your requirement:

• What are your goals and objectives with sentiment analysis?
• Which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) do you want to track?
• Do you wish to assess data in one language or multiple?
• How do you plan on using this data?
• What kind of emotions do you want to read?
• Do you want to invest in an easy-to-use tool, or are you willing to learn?
• What’s your budget?

Once you’ve noted your eligibility criteria—you can start exploring these top-rated sentiment analysis tools and choose the one that fits your requirement.  

Top 10 social media sentiment analysis tools in 2021

1. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is among the biggest names in the sentiment analysis domain. With the resources to monitor multiple aspects of social media, Brandwatch offers an end-to-end approach to analyze and use different metrics.

This software will give you a comprehensive report from campaigns and competitors to brand mentions, trends, and more. Together with word clouds for your brand’s most commonly used words, it also tracks several positive, negative, joy, and angry emotions.

Must-try feature: Image insights to find images connected to your brand’s logo. 

2. MonkeyLearn

Among the most easily customizable tools, MonkeyLearn allows you to review your audience sentiment as per your own categorization tags. You can tailor all the data and analytics for your brand, content strategy, and marketing campaigns through this feature.

This tool offers a host of integrations with platforms like Zapier, Google Sheets, and Zendesk, among others. You can even inject tags with your day-to-day apps to analyze data on the go and create or tweak workflows based on the findings.

Must-try feature: MonkeyLearn Studio for text and visual analysis in a single dashboard.3. Awario

Awario is another helpful tool you can use for social media sentiment analysis. This powerful SaaS product will work best for data enthusiasts who like deep-diving into oceans of figures and numbers.

Awario is also fit for tracking influencers for campaigns and similar social listening aspects, along with almost real-time sentiment analysis. It provides you with a word cloud and graph to display your brand’s position and progression over time on social media, blogs, and forums.

Must-try feature: Find leads easily by tracking those unhappy with your competitors. 

4. Clarabridge

Clarabridge is a customer experience management tool, enabling you to enhance your customer service. It also offers a communication platform between the customers and the company—allowing a seamless process and a quick fix for problems or glitches.

Even though it’s a sentiment analysis tool, the software focuses more on customer experience when delivering insights. It comes with an 11-point scale for measuring the most accurate sentiments based on people’s usage of words and grammar.

Must-try feature: Unified inbox for a one-stop view of all analytics from different platforms. 

5. Mention

A popular name in the social media management domain, Mention offers a complete suite of monitoring resources for sentiment analysis.

Apart from helping you schedule posts on your social media profile, the software also doubles as a tool for evaluating audience sentiment. It categorizes all analytics as per country, language, keywords, and influence to touch base on different aspects of social media.

6. RapidMiner

As suggested by the name, RapidMiner is a data-mining tool. It works best for analyzing sentiment in the more unstructured data on social media platforms.

This tool produces a comprehensive report on your brand position by evaluating any and every form of text—call transcripts, forms, blogs, and reviews. It’s unlike other sentiment analysis tools, given that it focuses on text mining.

Must-try feature: Fraud Detection from textual evidence.

7. HubSpot

HubSpot is a leading brand in the marketing and business world. But its Service Hub is specially designed to track customer sentiment and satisfaction.

With a comprehensive survey for Net Promoter Score, the tool evaluates whether customer reviews are positive, negative, or neutral. Unlike a typical social media sentiment analysis tool, this one works best for customer experience management. 

8. Brand24

One of the most common objectives of sentiment analysis on social media is online brand management. Brand24 achieves this goal through its social listening features.

The software presents a real-time analysis of mentions and tags your brand receives. It segments all data into different tabs—like Mentions, Analysis, and Summary to display data in various capacities.

Must-try feature: Influencer score for every brand mention.   

9. Social Mention

If you’re looking for a convenient way to analyze social media sentiment, Social Mention is among the best options. The tool functions like a search engine that summarizes different analytics for your keywords from various social media platforms.

While the tool isn’t as detailed as several others in this list, it works great for an overview report. From a ratio of positive and negative mentions to a prospective percentage of those interested in your brand—Social Mention provides a comprehensive summary. 
10. Repustate

Repustate is a powerful API capable of analyzing text and emoticons to measure audience sentiment. From topic analysis to aspect-related analysis, this tool creates in-depth dashboards with relevant data.

The tool allows you to put a language filter and track comments relevant to your niche. You can also enter specific words or slang associated with your business or industry for better tracking. With a variety of customization options, Repustate can give you some accurate insights.

Must-try feature: Connect any platform to the API and measure the results.

Final Thoughts

Social media can significantly power up your brand performance if you do it right—and sentiment analysis is a crucial element to achieve that.

Keeping track of your audience’s emotions through sentiment analysis can help you deliver better customer experiences. In addition to maintaining a positive brand image, it can also identify good leads through competitive benchmarking, thus, helping you turn prospects into customers.

Browse through this list of tools, choose the one that aligns with your marketing goals, and objectives to power up your social media engine, and take your customer engagement and social media performance to the next level.