Free social media sentiment analysis tools can be used for such diverse purposes as conducting a read of your brand and competitor monitoring. They can also be used to assess your performance on social media, evaluate word of mouth marketing efforts, and reveal what sorts of content your customers find valuable. Sentiment analysis is one of the most effective tools out there that can be leveraged to understand people’s attitudes and perceptions of your business.
The internet, social media and use of technology have introduced new changes in the way that business is carried out. A variety of free sentiment analysis tools are now readily available, allowing business professionals and individuals alike to carry out their own analysis before finalizing any financial transactions.
Using social media sentiment analysis tools is an element of social media intelligence that can help you navigate the complex world of social media. Sentiment analysis is essential for determining if what people are saying about your brand, competitive products and services, and industry is positive or negative. There are many online tools available that can be a great asset to your social intelligence toolbox.
Social media sentiment analysis is the process of identifying and analyzing opinions or emotions of people based on words expressing emotion within a social media content. This is normally done through the use of sentiment analysis tools. With the many free sentiment analysis tools available, it can be hard to find the best tool that could deliver on your needs and wants. In this article, we’ve reviewed the top ten free social media sentiment analysis tools, which will hopefully aid you in making a choice for yourself when it comes to choosing the best tool for your needs.
What is sentiment analysis?
Quite literally, sentiment analysis is the process of analyzing the emotions, feeling, or sentiment behind the textual or audial/visual (emojis) data with the help of a sentiment analysis software. This software analyzes text or audio based on the preprogrammed algorithm.
Sentiment analysis tools use Natural Language Processing or NLP to determine whether a piece of text is positive, negative, or neutral. Some sentiment analysis tools go beyond that and can even assign more detailed sentiment markers such as disappointment, excitement, or disgust to a piece of text. Sentiment analytics are often performed on text data sourced from social media, such as online reviews, emails, customer support chats, survey responses, blogs, and news items. In addition to that, some sentiment analysis tools can analyze voice clips or even analyze ongoing phone calls by applying Natural Language Processing logic to analyze the tone of voice.
The precision of the sentiment analytics software depends on the analysis algorithm it uses. It’s important to note that no sentiment analysis tools are 100% error-proof, no matter if it’s free or so expensive you can barely justify it. People often use sarcasm and slang in their communication which is hard to pick up even for the most advanced sentiment analysis tools. However, when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of messages from various channels every day, automating sentiment analysis is always much more efficient than combing through them manually.
Lexalytics
Lexalytics offers a text-analysis tool that’s focused on explaining why a customer is responding to your business in a certain way. It uses natural language processing to parse the text, then runs a sentiment analysis to determine the intent behind the customer’s message. Finally, Lexalytics concludes the process by compiling the information it derives into an easy-to-read and shareable display. While most sentiment analysis tools tell you how customers feel, Lexalytics differentiates itself by telling you why customers feel the way that they do.
Critical Mention
Critical Mention is different than the other options on this list because it analyzes news and other publications that reference your business. This way, you can see the sentiment behind stories that are rapidly surfacing to the public. Since news coverage is now a 24/7 affair, it helps to have software that can monitor the internet and alert you to any buzz your business is making.
Critical Mention can even alert you to stories that appear on television. You can search through video files for mentions of your company and easily clip videos to share with other employees. If your business gets positively mentioned on a live broadcast, quickly access the video segment and share it on your social media channels. This can help you create effective online content that capitalizes on timely marketing opportunities.
Price: Pricing available on request
Repustate
Repustate has a sophisticated text-analysis API that accurately assesses the sentiment behind customer responses. Its software can pick up on short-form text and slang like lol, rofl, and smh. It also analyzes emojis and determines their intention within the context of a message. For example, if I use a 😉 emoji, Repustate tells you if that’s a positive or negative symbol based on what it finds in the rest of the conversation.
Repustate also lets you customize your API’s rules to have it filter for language that may be specific to your industry. If there’s slang or alternate meanings for words, you can program those subtleties into Repustate’s system. This way you have full control over how the software analyzes your customers’ feedback.
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 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.
HubSpot’s Service Hub
HubSpot’s Service Hub tools include a customer feedback tool that can break down qualitative survey responses and evaluate them for positive or negative intent. It uses NPS® surveys to clarify whether a customer’s review was good or bad and organizes them based on their sentiment. Users analyze the results by looking at one comprehensive dashboard that includes charts and graphs which provide an overview of customer satisfaction.
HubSpot’s Service Hub suite can also analyze customers on an individual basis. You can integrate your CRM with Service Hub and review survey responses from specific contacts in your database. That way, your team can quickly identify customers who are unhappy and follow up with them after they’ve had a negative experience with your brand. Remember, 58% of customers will stop doing business with you if your company falls short of their expectations. this gives your team an opportunity to intercept unhappy customers and prevent potential churn.
Price: $45/month for Starter Plan, $360/month for Professional Plan, $1,200/month for Enterprise Plan
Talkwalker
Talkwalker’s “Quick Search” is a sentiment analysis tool that’s part of a larger customer service platform. This tool works best with your social media channels because it can tell you exactly how people feel about your company’s social media accounts. Quick Search looks at your mentions, comments, engagements, and other data to provide your team with an extensive breakdown of how customers are responding to your social media activity. This helps your team plan and produce effective campaigns that captivate your target audience.
Brand24
Brand24 is a media monitoring tool in its essence and sentiment analysis is just one of the features you can use to your advantage. Brand24 offers web and social media monitoring. The tool covers all major social media networks, blogs, forums, web, news sites, podcasts, and newsletters.
Sentiment analysis algorithm is applied to all collected mentions and social media posts. Brand24 covers the majority of online sources, including:
- Web
- blogs and forums
- social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitch
- podcasts
- newsletters
- news sites
Brand24 collects mentions in real-time and offers robust media monitoring analytics. That’s why it’s one of the best sentiment analysis tools on the market.
Thanks to sentiment analysis, you can not only track your brand online but also determine brand sentiment.
It can be used inside the different tabs of the tool’s dashboard. Brand24 applies machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to analyse the text data in real-time.
Thanks to Brand24 you can easily check which mentions are positive, negative, or neutral.
First and foremost, we need to take a look inside the Mentions tab.
Discover the power of sentiment analysis. Start your free trial!Try free!
The green and red lines on the bottom part of the graph represent changes in sentiment score over time. The spikes and dips make it easy to identify what were the reasons for changes of sentiment.
Additionally, you can filter your mentions based on sentiment:
Here is some sentiment analysis example!
Analyze the sentiment around your brand for free!Try free!
If you want to go deeper with your analysis, visit, well, the Analysis tab:
Alternatively, you can also have a peek inside the Summary tab:
What’s more you can easily export the results into PDF reports to show the results of your work to your supervisors. The PDF reports contain analysis of your social media sentiment analysis as well as other data that help you achieve your goals.
Why should you use sentiment analysis?
Emotions are often the driving force behind purchasing decisions thus, by analyzing how customers feel i.e. the sentiment behind their communication, you tap into a valuable source of business insights.
To make it more specific, here are some of the common business goals for utilizing sentiment analysis software:
- Determining brand reputation
- Improving customer experience
- Preventing a brand reputation crisis
- Improving marketing campaigns and product messaging
- Testing business KPIs
- Generating leads
- Researching product decisions
You can use the sentiment analytics insights you get to inform business decisions or combine them with other tools you use. For example, by integrating sentiment analysis in your chatbot communication, you can make sure your automated responses are more relevant and appropriate.
Conclusion
Social media is the communication where one person can communicate with hundreds of other people at once. It has become the place where the majority of people express their opinion. People post their experiences and thoughts about many things including brands, products and services that they use every day. Because of this important aspect it is natural for business to be interested in opinions and views of their clients. Social media sentiment analysis is exactly what helps businesses to find out about the attitudes of their clients. A good social media analytics tool will analyze social media attitudes of users and show results in a way they can be used.
Social media sentiment analysis is the measurement of the attitudes and sentiments that individuals express towards brands and products on social media. Social media sentiment analysis tools can be used by companies to gauge public opinion and track consumer response.