In the world of content writing and online marketing, analytics is playing a significant part in determining user behavior and website traffic. Yet still, they lack in analyzing the consumer sentiments and feelings towards the products or services offered by your company. That is when Sentiment Analysis comes into effect.

So, what is sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis is the method of study and analysis of the feelings and emotions of the consumers on a product, brand or service. The analysis is performed by the process that leverages machine learning and automation strategies. It essentially performs the study by categorizing statements from the consumers. The voice of the customer is captured to conduct the analysis and to understand the feelings and sentiments towards a product or service.

There are plenty of Sentiment Analysis Tools available in the market and online on the internet. In this article, we will be discussing how to do sentiment analysis and the best sentiment analysis tools available for reference and guidance.

How to do Sentiment Analysis?

Before finding out the best sentiment analysis tools, let us first try to understand how to do sentiment analysis or the steps that need to be followed for performing sentiment analysis.

• Data Collection: First and foremost, you need to collect the data that is essential for sentiment analysis. The data can be retrieved or extracted from various sources like social media platforms, emails, review sites, etc. Besides you can conduct surveys, gather comments from websites, reviews, or any other available media from the internet.
• Data Cleansing: Before analyzing the data, it is essential to cleanse the data. Since the data is collected in raw form from various sources and in various formats, it needs to be clean and properly arranged for analysis. This will ensure faster data processing and effective analysis.
• Tool-based sentimental analysis: We will be discussing the best sentiment analysis tools to churn out the data and perform the necessary slice and dice; depending on the customer’s behavioral characteristics. The techniques and algorithms followed by the tools help in understanding the consumer’s preferences about a product, brand, or service.
• Data interpretation: Once data collection is complete and the appropriate sentiment analysis tools have been selected, the next step is understanding the data or data interpretation. You need to infer the behaviors, sentiments, and feelings of a customer and accordingly devise your promotional and marketing strategies for the products or services. Also, you need to address any sentiment issues leveraging potential strategies and techniques for further positive interactions of the users.

Best Sentiment Analysis Tools

In this section, we will discuss the best sentiment analysis tools, their key features, and the pricing of each.

Brand24

Brand24 is one of the best and most popular sentiment analysis tools. Leveraging AI technology, it is a monitoring and social media analytics platform. The tool helps to track keywords used in the online content and website blogs across multiple social media platforms. The keywords are analyzed based on the performance of the hashtag, the reach across social media platforms, and mentions by different users. The study and analysis by the tool assist in increasing the reputation of the brand, gaining marketing insights, and enhancing customer service.

The key features of the tool include:

• It finds out the changes envisaged in the discussions, comments, and feedback from the users or customers. Based on the deviations and fluctuations of responses, tries to identify the problems before further escalation
• Check out the comments shared by the users and customers in different social media platforms and other forums and address them in real-time
• Helps in creating customized alerts for monitoring the brand, product, or service of the company as per your preferences and needs
• The data generated or extracted by the tool can be exported in the form of spreadsheets, PDFs, and infographics
• The data can be filtered based on the sentiment or preferences of customers, the number of visits to the website, source, and other options.

Pricing: There are 3 pricing plans – Plus for USD 49 per month, Premium for USD 99 per month, and Max for USD 299 per month

Talkwalker Analytics

Talkwalker Analytics is one of the useful and powerful sentiment analysis tools. The tool has several advanced features that help in analyzing data and sentiment based on the data collected from social media platforms and various online forums. It helps significantly in analyzing and monitoring your brand, company or service. Along with it, it also checks the progress and growth of competitors and their marketing visibility. It checks data from the past 2 years and leverages its algorithms and techniques for arriving at the analysis.

The key features of the tool include:

• Leverages image recognition technology that is fully and cohesively integrated to capture the data and perform the analysis. Even visual content can be extracted using the technology
• Has a virality map for tracking the campaigns which went viral and replicating the same in the future marketing strategies
• Uses AI-driven strategies to monitor the content in real-time across various social media platforms, forums, and marketing channels in almost 187 languages
• Contains a centralized hub or area for assimilating the data captured through various sources
• Creates dashboards that can be customized to display the information, data, and analytics as per your preferences and needs
• Consists of approximately 30 in-built use cases for social media reporting

Pricing: There are 3 pricing plans to select from. Listening starts at USD 9000 per year. The price of the rest two Analytics and Research are available only via quote.

Hubspot Service Hub

Hubspot Service Hub is one of the best sentiment analysis tools. It’s unique among all the other tools. The key attractions of the tool are its excellent customer service facilities via surveys or sentiment analysis, conversational tools, automation of handling requests via helpdesk, good knowledge base, and many more.

The key features of the tool are:

• Provides options for multiple surveys via CES, CSAT, NPS. It also has provisions for custom surveys which help to gather feedback and comments from users and customers. The survey results and data are analyzed to devise strategies and techniques of enhancing customer experience.
• Create a comprehensive library for assisting and helping customers with videos, articles, and necessary documents

Pricing: The plans for the tool vary within the price ranging between USD 45 and USD 1200 per month

Social Animal

Social Animal also leverages the latest technology of machine learning and AI. It is also one of the prominent sentiment analysis tools. You can perform a variety of activities like content discovery, analysis, and research. Also, it helps to gain marketing insights, monitor presence and visibility into social media platforms, and check competitors’ growth in the market. The tool captures, collects, and tracks data for studying, analyzing, monitoring, and understanding the behavior of customers and competitors.

The key features of the tool are:

• Find out influencers from the huge user base available across social media platforms and various marketing forums and check the ones who are the best fit for the brand, product or service
• Check out the trending, unique and new ideas for content writing and recommend the same. This helps in gaining more audience
• Monitors the performance of competitors and their targeted audience. This helps in devising strategies to cope up with the market competition
• Studies and analyzes almost more than 100K Facebook pages for competitor assessment, viral posts, sentiment analysis, and user responses through tags and mentions

Pricing: There are 3 pricing plans – Blogger for USD 49 per month or USD 492 per year, Enterprise for USD 199 per month or USD 1992 per year, and Agency for USD 499 per month or USD 4992 per year.

Lexalytics

Lexalytics is one of the best cloud-based sentiment analysis tools. It leverages natural language processing for study and analysis. At the next step, it consolidates the research work and compiles them into easily readable and shareable reports. The tool is fully integrated with MS-Excel which facilitates seamless data upload into other reporting and analytical tools. Besides, it checks grammatical errors and the aesthetic parts of the language.

The key features of the tool are:

• Consists of pre-built industry configurations that help to categorize data and the users, detect the topics that gain high visibility and response, and for accurate sentiments
• Provision for supporting multiple languages and dialects almost 24 of them approximately that is spread across 6 continents
• It is easily configurable, allows setting up custom entities, new query topics, category taxonomies, and using tools for graphical configuration

Pricing: The one-time system cost is USD 10K and the ongoing cost is USD 999 per month

Clarabridge

Clarabridge is one of the preferred sentiment analysis tools by many professionals. Powered by the CX Social and CX Analytics functionalities and features, it helps in monitoring social media platforms, various news sites, forums, review sites, and many blogs. The data collected by the tool is used for studying and analyzing sentiments, engagement rate, visits, and response time. The tags and mentions are considered for the calculations. The tool has a scoring mechanism through an 11-point scale measurement. Grammatical errors are checked. Analysis is based on the context and industry to which the brand, company or service is related.

The key features of the tool are:

• Leverages two approaches – grammatical and lexical for sentiment analysis at the clause level
• Data collection from various sources like surveys, emails, chats, telephone calls, different forums, reviews and ratings
• Has pre-built configurations and industry categorizations for grouping the data collected into relevant buckets. The categorization and segregation help in further analysis
• Performs sentiment analysis by devising strategies leveraging AI technology. The strategies are powerful enough to recognize and identify almost 21 different kinds of behavioral intents or characteristics like requests for help, accolades, feedback, comments, tags, mentions, and legal disclosures in certain feedback from customers and users.
• Understand the feelings and emotions of the customers in relation to the brand, company, or service of your company
• Analyze the usability and applicability of the keywords which customers use for searching your website content or blogs

Pricing: Request for quote for the monthly or yearly plans

Critical Mention

Critical Mention is one of the acclaimed sentiment analysis tools, most appropriately a platform. The tools help in collecting and tracking data and then analyzing, managing, and monitoring it across all social media channels and other marketing forums. Even, it scans the various news and reviews sites or other publication media for performing sentiment analysis. Besides, there are mentions, tags, comments, feedback, live broadcasts, and video files to collect data and perform the analysis.

The key features of the tool are:

• Sentiment study, analysis, and trends are measured with the help of word clouds and density maps
• Powerful engine for searching keywords and retrieving results within almost 60 seconds along with seamless notifications in real-time mode
• The reports and dashboards generated from the tool can be customized in the form of various graphs and charts
• Sharing of reports or any required data can be done instantly in one click

Pricing: Request for quote for the monthly or yearly plans

Repustate

Repustate is also powered by AI technology, which lists it among the best sentiment analysis tools. The tool collects data from social media platforms, surveys, news sites, review sites, podcasts, videos, and other forums and provides insights into the sentiments and emotions of the customer. The data is collected automatically leveraging semantic technology that tracks the feelings, emotions, and intentions of the users. The tool then utilizes language analysis technology to check the perceptions, preferences, and thoughts on your company’s brand, product, or service.

The key features of the tool are:

• Supports multiple languages almost 20 and analysis using them
• Faster speed almost 12X in data collection and analysis and which is 50% accurate
• The tool can be deployed easily in one click using either the on-premise version or the API version

Pricing: The standard plan costs INR 299 per month. However, you can request a custom plan and ask for a quote for it.

Brandwatch

Brandwatch scans through numerous online interactions of users and customers and provides intelligent insights into sentiments and emotions. It is one of the best sentiment analysis tools, deciphering data and information about the customers, their behavioral characteristics including motivations, preferences, and feelings about your company’s brand, company or service. It has a special feature called image insights for recognizing and identifying the images linked to the brand, for example, the brand logo. Besides, the tool helps in tracking the metrics from different social media platforms like the activities of customers, followers, traffic, and volume.

The key features of the tool are:

• Data and Image analysis through advanced AI technology enabling robust search mechanism
• The UI of the tool is powerful and flexible with almost more than 50 live visualizations
• Has access to a huge amount of consumer research data. It is almost equivalent to the world’s largest consumer opinions’ data amounting to 1.4 trillion posts starting way back from the year 2008
• Comprehensively and fully integrated with a number of analytical and intelligence products

Pricing: Request for quote for the monthly or yearly plans

Social Mention

Social Mention is one of the simplest sentiment analysis tools. Its UI is easy and convenient to use. There is a search box that helps in the fast search of sentiments, tags, mentions, keywords, and many others. A report is generated with all the relevant data and information of the customers. Besides, the tool helps in tracking and monitoring various social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and also Google, Digg, FriendFeed, and many other websites and marketing forums. It is cohesively integrated with various data collection and intelligence platforms through an API.

The key features of the tool are:

• Performs sentiment analysis of the tags, mentions, comments, and feedback be it positive, negative or neutral
• Provides advanced search facilities using keywords, time durations or timelines, various sources, and many other options
• Alerts from various social media platforms whenever there are any engagements related to sentiments or behavioral characteristics
• Pricing: Free tool

Conclusion

Before shortlisting and selecting from the best sentiment analysis tools as mentioned in this article, check out your preferences, needs, and budget. Then verify and validate the features and functionalities of the tools and finalize the one to be used for improving the marketing and promotion strategies of your brand, product or service. The tools are a powerful means of understanding customer sentiments and hence devise strategies and techniques for further collaboration and increase in engagement.

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