Setting out to optimize your social media strategy can feel overwhelming if you look at the whole picture. However, once you start breaking the entire process down into actionable steps, the way forward becomes clear. One important metric to consider (and one that is often overlooked) is called “social media sentiment.” Understanding this metric and how to leverage it in upcoming campaigns can be an integral component in understanding how to better connect with your audience. But what is social media sentiment, and why should you factor it into your content curation strategy?
Let’s dig into the answer to this question, as well as take a look at the top 9 best social media sentiment analysis tools so you can take confident strides forward with upcoming campaigns.
What Is Social Media Sentiment & Why Does It Matter?
While it is vitally important to consider metrics like “shares,” “subscribes,” “views,” and “likes” on your social media channels, assessing engagement alone only paints a partial portrait of your overall success at resonating with your target audience. At its core, social media sentiment refers to more than just mentions or comments tagging your brand, but instead the deeper emotions, motivations, and opinions behind these comments. After all, marketing is an emotions-based industry that relies heavily on empathetic understanding of your audience–so taking this approach to developing your next steps in strategy can really level up your game.
Sometimes called “opinion mining,” social media sentiment digs into the context and connotations behind the comments made about your brand or company online, breaking these down into segmented data for easier comprehension. After all, effective marketing is a balancing act between science and art, requiring data-backed creativity for the most effective results.
9 Best Social Media Sentiment Analysis Tools
Because there is quite a variety of tools on the market, we’ve done the heavy lifting and curated a list of the 9 best social media sentiment analysis tools for your convenience. Remember to consider the unique needs, goals, and budget constraints of your business model–including scalability concerns for best long-term results!
1. MonkeyLearn
MonkeyLearn comes with a pre-built easy-start template for running general social media sentiment analysis based on your current performance–but if you’re looking for even more granular results, you can easily adjust your settings to create a completely customized set of data–without any necessary code knowledge!
By adding personalized input unique to your business, you can cultivate highly targeted and accurate outcomes, even teaching its learning model to recognize industry-specific jargon. Data is easily accessed through MonkeyLearn Studio, which also integrates with platforms like Google Sheets and Zendesk. One downside is that they do require contact for pricing.
2. Brandwatch
This award-winning social media sentiment analysis tool was featured in the Forrester Wave list of top-performing social listening platforms of 2020. With above-average accuracy, Brandwatch allows the user to navigate complexities like consumer voice, around-the-clock, real-time brand visibility, sentiment fluctuations, and more.
Users can easily segment this data and further refine their approach to analysis through custom classifiers, leveraging its singular “image insights” feature that provides a look into how and where your logos are shared online. Contact Brandwatch for a free demo!
3. Social Searcher
Looking for a singular place to assess incoming data from a variety of social media platforms? Social Searcher allows brand developers to do just this. With the ability to track hashtags, keywords, and usernames, business owners can enjoy Social Searcher’s palatable data visualization platform, allowing them to glean deeper insights about the sentiment of each post, providing answers to your queries regarding next steps for future engagement.
Social Searcher does offer a free plan, including a 14-day free trial, and their professional paid plan (with even deeper analytics features) starts at a reasonable $21 per month.
4. MeaningCloud
MeaningCloud allows users to easily break down if their brand is being talked about in a positive, negative, or neutral way–in a variety of languages. With a customizable learning dictionary, business owners can update MeaningCloud’s learning model to incorporate and adapt to industry-specific verbiage–assessing sentiment down to each independent sentence.
It can even distinguish between opinions and facts! With a free plan, MeaningCloud does offer tiered payment options with increasingly useful features, with business plans starting at $99 per month.
5. Lexalytics
This cloud-based platform allows for easy, secure data storage with immediate recall, as long as you have a protected internet connection. While Lexalytics can be personalized and tailored to your company’s unique niche and needs, it is a little more advanced than other social media sentiment analysis tools and may require a data science background to get comfortable with it.
Providing both data visualization and text analysis, Lexalytics stores your gathered intelligence in its online business flow platform, streamlining data collection and providing key industry insights. This platform also requires reaching out for a custom quote.
6. Critical Mention
Critical Mention allows business owners to capitalize on positive trends in their brand’s reputation while also quickly tackling any negative PR issues. With this tool, users can easily track branded mentions and terms on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as access specific trending keywords.
Their competitor analysis feature allows you to weigh your success within your niche, including a brand health analysis tool. With ample awards under its belt, Critical Mention invites inquisitive brand ambassadors to connect with them for a custom quote.
7. Talkwalker Consumer Intelligence Platform
With the ability to analyze your campaign performance in over 25 languages, Talkwalker effortlessly assesses social media communications to provide actionable insights. With its own built-in search engine, Talkwalker provides a clear, colorful, comprehensive platform with data visualization for better comprehension and interpretation.
Offering on-the-fence business owners a customized demo before purchase, Talkwalker requires filling out an intake form (or calling one of their global offices) for a personalized quote tailored to your business’ optimal data-gathering solution.
8. Qualtrics
If you’re serious about your marketing outreach strategy, you likely don’t have all your “eggs” in the social media “basket.” Qualtrics provides business owners with the opportunity to assess their performance and customer sentiment through a variety of mediums, including email, chats, social media, surveys, and beyond.
With a comprehensive Speech Analytics tool, Qualtrics is particularly helpful for companies that provide a lot of phone support to clients and other forms of audio communication–making it an ideal solution for customer-facing roles like sales and support.
9. Repustate
With multilingual data collection in 23 languages and access to fast, niche, and accurate real-time data across a litany of platforms, Repustate relies on a cloud-based API that boasts easy integration into tech platforms you likely already use.
Best of all, its language learning model can interpret and contextualize industry jargon, slang, and even local dialects to provide even deeper analysis opportunities. Other services offered by Repustate include brand monitoring, competitor analysis, market research, and others–making scaling efforts a snap. Repustate requires outreach for drawing up a custom plan for your business.
Summary
Social media sentiment may seem like a relatively arbitrary and nebulous concept–but with the help of these best social media sentiment analysis tools, you can easily take the temperature of your audience and assess next steps for your business.
While it can seem like emotions are anything but quantifiable, this extraordinary, language-based technology can provide profound insights into the context of your online brand appearances, streamlining your outreach efforts and drawing you in on the right path for your company.
