Sentiment analysis, or opinion mining, is the process of extracting subjective information from text. Being able to analyze and understand text sentiment has a wide variety of applications including social media management, customer service, content marketing, and more. In this article, I will give a brief introduction to the field of sentiment analysis before listing some of the best free online tools that you can use to perform your own sentiment analysis tasks on a large scale.
In the last decade, sentiment analysis has been one of the most crucial aspects of text analytics. In fact, this study showed that the use of sentiment analysis is increasing day by day. It is now being used in both government and commercial applications to make better decisions faster by analyzing social media messages and texts.
What Is a Sentiment Analysis Tool?
A sentiment analysis tool is a software that analyzes text conversations and evaluates the tone, intent, and emotion behind each message. By digging deeper into these elements, the tool uncovers more context from your conversations and helps your customer service team accurately analyze feedback. This is particularly useful for brands that actively engage with their customers on social media, live chat, and email where it can be difficult to determine the sentiment behind a message.
Brand Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis helps brands learn more about customer perception using qualitative feedback. By leveraging an automated system to analyze text-based conversations, businesses can discover how customers genuinely feel about their products, services, marketing campaigns, and more.
Benefits of Adopting a Sentiment Analysis Tool
If your company provides an omnichannel experience, a sentiment analysis tool can save your team valuable time organizing and reporting customer feedback.
Rather than going through each tweet and comment one-by-one, a sentiment analysis tool processes your feedback and automatically interprets whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral. Then, it compounds your data and displays it in charts or graphs that clearly outline trends in your customer feedback. This not only gives your team accurate information to work with, but frees up time for your employees to work on other tasks in their day-to-day workflow.
Now that you know what a sentiment analysis tool is and how it can benefit your business, let’s take a look at some of the best tools available for 2021.
’ll start with the tools that are easy to set up and are able to search for, collect, and analyze data on their own, and then move on to the tools that require some sort of integration or an external data import. The former is extremely user-friendly and can help you solve a wide range of marketing and business tasks. The latter will be useful if you’re looking to integrate sentiment analysis for all your communication channels at once. I’m sure you’ll be able to find something that works for you in this post.
1. Awario
Best for audience analysis, market research, reputation management, competitor analysis.
Awario is a web-based social listening tool, with sentiment analysis being only a part of its vast capabilities. The data Awario analyzes comes from social media platforms (including tweets, posts, Reddit threads, etc.), forums, blogs, and websites, and you get access to sentiment analysis as soon as you log into the tool. It can estimate the sentiment of the mentions in real-time.
You set Awario to gather online data by putting in the keywords you want to monitor. They can relate to your brand, your product, competitors, industry, or any other phenomena you want to research online.
In the screenshot above you can see Awario’s sentiment analysis of the two major American parties. The tool analyzes the percent of negative sentiment, neutral, and positive sentiment.
Awario does all sorts of real-time social listening and data analytics: it displays the volume and reach of mentions for your keywords, the words commonly used along with them, and breakdowns of the volume of keywords by language, source, location, and more. You can also compare this data, including sentiment, for several groups of keywords. For example, you can find out how much negative sentiment you get online and benchmark the number against your competitors.
All this information is depicted through comprehensive drafts and can be exported and easily shared with your coworkers.
Pricing
You can try this software for free for seven days.
There are three main plans for users: Starter is $29, Pro is $89 and Enterprise is $299 a month. The prices for yearly plans start at $290. You can also choose a Custom plan should you need more powerful analytics. Sign up for a free Awario trialSee Awario in action with a free 7-day trial. No credit card is required.
By signing up I agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy
2. Talkwalker
Best for brand and campaign monitoring, competitor analysis, reputation management.
Talkwalker is another sentiment analysis tool that analyzes social media data. It uses its AI to check and analyze the tone of individual online mentions collected from major social media networks as well as blogs and forums. It can even automatically detect basic forms of sarcasm.
The tool allows you to track customer trends and see which features of your product your customers are drawn to, and which features turn them away. Similar to Awario, it offers some competitor intelligence capabilities along with other important online data metrics such as engagement and demographics.
Pricing
You can get a free demo if you want to see Talkwalker in action. The prices start at $9,600 a year.
3. Social Searcher
Best for brand monitoring.
Social Searcher is a free web-based solution for social media monitoring. Once you get to the tool’s page, it takes you straight to the settings where you can put in your keyword. It then sources data from 11 different sources including Twitter, Facebook, and the web.
To see sentiment analysis of the gathered mentions, you need to go to the Detailed analytics tab and choose Sentiment. The tool will show you the share of positive, negative, and neutral mentions as well as the ratio of positive to negative mentions. In the same tab, it shows you the sentiment ratio for each source and most popular positive, negative, and neutral posts.
Pricing
The tool is free for up to 100 keyword requests. You can also buy Premium Monitoring starting at $4 a month.
4. Brandwatch
Best for market and audience research.
Brandwatch also specializes in online data analysis, but compared to Social Searcher it does it on a much bigger scale. The tool assigns one of the six labels based on its sentiment analysis: anger, disgust, fear, joy, surprise, or sadness. The algorithm that is used to analyze sentiment was developed by Brandwatch’s in-house team.
You can set the tool to notify you if it detects a mention with a specific emotion, for example, every time someone expresses disgust. There is also an option to add specific keywords to the sentiment analysis model and associate emotions with these keywords thus adding your own sentiment markers to the analysis. To make the insights even more detailed, the sentiment analysis can be broken down by audiences.
Pricing
The price, as well as a free demo, are provided upon request.
5. NCSU Tweet Sentiment Visualization App
Best for market research on Twitter.
In case you’re looking for a specific tool that analyzes sentiment on Twitter, here’s the best one.
Twitter can be an amazing platform for research, especially in tech, media, politics, and some other industries. Unlike other tools on this list, the app arranges the data on a spectrum of emotions organized along two axes: unpleasant to pleasant and active to subdued. The data is also analyzed by major topics featured in conversations around your keywords to help you understand the deeper meaning behind the tweets.
Pricing
The application is free.
6. Brandwatch
One of the coolest features that Brandwatch provides is its “image insights” tool which can identify images associated with your brand. For example, say you upload an image of your brand’s logo. Brandwatch surfs the web for images that include that logo. Then, it compiles the images into a list and highlights exactly where your brand’s logo is appearing.
Additionally, Brandwatch’s software provides interesting insights into each image it finds. This includes metrics like mention volume, aggregate followers, and the latest activity. With Brandwatch, your team sees where your brand’s images are appearing and how those images are performing with your target audience.
Price: Pricing available upon request
7. Social Mention
Social Mention is a free social media analysis tool that provides users with one of the best bangs for their buck. First, users don’t have to create an account or download software. Instead, you just need to navigate to their site and search for your keyword like you would with any search engine. Upon entering your search, Social Mention pulls data about your keyword from every social media site and compiles it into a comprehensive summary.
This summary isn’t primitive, either. It can tell you useful things like the ratio of people speaking positively about your keyword versus those who are speaking of it negatively. It can also tell you what percentage of people are likely to continue mentioning your keyword and how popular your brand is on social media. While you can’t really analyze individual pieces of data, Social Mention is a great option for people looking to get a brief synopsis of their social media reputation.
Price: Free
8. Sentiment Analyzer
Working with Sentiment Analyzer is a breeze. Simply navigate to their site, copy the text you want to analyze, and paste the text into the box. Select “Analyze!” and the website will evaluate your text and give you a “sentiment score.”
While that might sound like magic, Sentiment Analyzer uses “computational linguistics and text mining” to determine the sentiment behind your piece of text. It then compounds and compares its findings to produce an overall score. This makes it a great tool for companies looking to quickly decipher the intent behind a confusing response from a customer.
Price: Free
Conclusions
The Internet has made this world into a global village. People from every corner of the world are now able to connect and share information through various means. The Internet has also become an important vehicle for people to voice out their sentiments, whether positive or negative, about a particular issue or topic.