Sentiment analysis is something very new and immature. Sentiment analysis allows you to identify general attitudes towards your brand (or a product).

The goal of sentiment analysis is to assign a given social media comment with a degree of association to three basic categories: positive, negative or neutral.

1. Social Mention

Social mention is always my first choice when it comes to the sentiment analysis. It allows to search in multiple categories including:

• Blogs;
• Q&A sites;
• Twitter;
• Social bookmarking sites;
• Images;
• News, etc.

Socialmention’s sentiment is “the ratio of mentions that are generally positive to those that are generally negative.” They use textual analysis, emoticons, symbols to analyze the sentiment.

While many people call it flawed, SocialMention’s sentiment analysis is as good as you are currently able to get from a machine.

Socialmention’s sentiment ratio:

Socialmention’s sentiment distribution:

2. AlertRank Sentiment Analysis

AlertRank, a tool I reviewed just a few days ago, is a web based utility that adds some really great features to Google Alerts.

It allows you to configure the sentiment manually by clicking an icon next to each Google Alerts result:

After that the average sentiment is visualized via a nicely-looking graph:

Twitter Sentiment Analysis

With Twitter real-time search, sentiment analysis has become a particularly hot topic. Here are 4 free, registration-free services that can help you analyze Twitter sentiment of your brand:

	How sentiment is analyzed	Limitations	Tracking	Visualization
Twitter Search	and icons used in a Tweet	none	RSS feed of search results	None
Twitter Sentiment	Twitter sentiment classification (~80% accuracy)	Only one page of results is analyzed	Saved searches (you’ll be able to access your search online)	Graph
Twitrratr	Analyzes the search term against a list of positive and negative keywords	No history	None	Color-based visualization (words that defined the sentiment are also highlighted)
Twendz	combination of keywords and symbols + cross-reference against a list of positive and negative keywords	70 recent Tweets	None	Yes

(Also see screenshots of each tool below)

Twitter Search:

Twitter Sentiment:

Twitrratr

Twendz

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

3 Tools to Analyze the Sentiment of Your Brand Social Mentions

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 10:48 am and is filed under Search News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.