Best Social Media Sentiment Analysis Tools in 2023 – Free & Paid

In 2023, businesses don’t just guess how people feel about their company, they use sentiment analysis tools.

Social media sentiment analysis is the process of interpreting a customer’s perception of a brand, product, or service. Basically, it’s about tracking brand mentions and performing text analysis to understand your audience’s opinions, behaviors, and feelings. Marketers use sentiment analysis to create better brand-building strategies.

So, how do you analyze social media sentiment?

There are paid and free sentiment analysis tools that can help you with that.

Stick around, because all will be answered in a second.

So let’s start!

What is a Sentiment Analysis Tool?

Sentiment analysis tools are AI-powered softwares that automatically analyze text data and identify sentiment scores. In other words, they help businesses understand if the customer sentiment behind a brand mention is positive, negative, or neutral.

Anything that contains a form of text can be a source for text analysis. That means that sentiment analysis tools search websites, online reviews, social media platforms, chat messages, emails, etc.

While the source may differ from time to time, there’s one thing remaining the same. Sentiment analysis works by detecting a text conversation’s

• Emotion
• Intent
• Tone
• Urgency

By assigning positive, neutral, or negative sentiment tags to brand mentions, these tools help companies understand the overall brand sentiment. In brief, how the majority of a company’s target audience really feels about certain topics, brands, products, or services.

Why Should you Use Sentiment Analysis Tools?

Businesses use sentiment analysis tools to:

• Understand customer feelings

Sentiment analysis tools reveal the context of your online conversations to help you understand what your customers really need. Sooner or later, you’ll know how to improve the customer experience with your products or services.

• Monitor brand reputation

Diving deeply into audience emotions lets business owners be in control of their brand reputation –a job that’s already tough. Surprisingly, statistics argue that it takes about 40 positive customer experiences to fix the damage caused by one negative mention.

• Prevent Crisis

Filtering results by negative emotion will help you prioritize urgent mentions, reviews, and messages to deal with them first. For example, effective Twitter sentiment analysis has helped brands avoid getting canceled, before.

• Find influencers

By analyzing social sentiment, you can find the right influencers –people that are already talking positively about your brand. Better yet, you could discover influencers that talked negatively about your products/services and change their minds.

• Track marketing campaign results

Monitor specific conversations, keywords, and hashtags and identify their sentiment score to really evaluate the success of your digital marketing campaigns. What resonated with your target audience and what they disliked about your efforts?

• Improve customer service

Track your chat messages, review responses, and customer complaints. Based on the sentiment, you’ll know what practices you should avoid and what makes your customer service unique.

• Benchmark against competitors

Brands can spy on competitors to see what people don’t like about their competitors. Thereafter, they know what people need and they can try to offer it to them.

Key Features to Look for in Social Media Sentiment Analysis Tools

There are certain features you need to check when choosing the best sentiment analysis tools. These include:

• Accuracy

Check the tool’s free trial (unless you find free sentiment analysis tools) to test if it shows the actual mentions

• Real-time monitoring

Can the tool support instant tracking and AI analysis of multiple mentions?

• Language support

Most tools can only track conversations in a certain number of languages. Make sure your tool supports the languages of your targeted audiences.

• Types of sentiment

How far can emotion detection go? Most tools scale their emotion classification between positive and negative.

• Customer support

A strong customer support system is equally important to a tool’s functionality, as personal or technical problems are always going to come up.

• Reporting features

Customizable reports make the life of PR and social media managers easier.

• Source variety

Some tools stick to social media monitoring or search engine scanning and others cover multiple sources.

• Analysis complexity

Not every human mention features the words “happy”, “angry”, or “sad”. You need to know that your tool is using the right technology to understand and classify more complex expressions.

How Does a Sentiment Analysis Tool Work?

In order to accurately understand the emotion behind online customer feedback, sentiment analysis software leverages advanced machine learning.

What technologies are used for sentiment analysis?

In detail, social sentiment is measured by analyzing online discussions with natural language processing (NLP). But you don’t need to dive deeply into tech details.

Intelligent social media sentiment analysis tools, like Mentionlytics, perform AI social sentiment analysis in 3 steps.

• At first, they monitor all your mentions –including hashtags, brand and product/service names, keywords, social comments, etc.
• Then, they analyze text data and accurately identify and classify each mention’s sentiment.
• Finally, they calculate your overall social sentiment score –for example, the negative sentiment percentage of your total mentions.

Top 10 Social Media Sentiment Analysis Tools

Here’s a list of today’s top sentiment analysis tools.

1. Mentionlytics

Best known for: Sentiment Analysis, Social Media Monitoring, Reputation Management, Social Listening

Mentionlytics is an all-in-one media monitoring tool that offers valuable insights to marketers. Operating with intelligent sentiment analysis software, Mentionlytics scans websites and social media platforms for mentions and automatically analyzes them.

Using this tool, you can track conversations online. You can discover what’s being said about you on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, TikTok, Google Reviews, Reddit, and more. Additionally, Mentionlytics offers cool social media management features, like content scheduling and posting content across multiple social networks. The platform’s promise includes high-quality brand mentions and accurate insights about critical performance metrics and KPIs.

Mentionlytics Features

• Social Intelligence Advisor for personalized advice on social media strategy optimization;
• Advanced sentiment analysis in more than 50 language options;
• Advanced Boolean search for result filtering via keywords and hashtag combinations with operators such as AND, NOT, and OR;
• Free social media report builder for customized reporting;
• Intelligent media monitoring for your brand, industry, and competitors
• Review monitoring and influencer identification
• Simplified team collaboration, with real-time notifications, tags, labels, and task assignments;

Mentionlytics Pricing

• Basic ($49/month)
• Essential ($99/month)
• Advanced ($199/month)
• Pro ($299/month)
• Agency ($450+/month)
• Enterprise ($950+/month)

2. Hootsuite

Best known for: Social Media Management, Content Scheduling

Hootsuite is a popular digital marketing suite that helps users manage and improve their online presence effortlessly.

The platform offers brand monitoring tools to track social mentions, messages, and conversations, as well as management and analytics features. Hootsuite allows users to review their competitors and upgrade their online performance in 35 supported social media channels. For example, Hootsuite Insights performs sentiment analysis to help companies understand how their audience feels about their brand.

Hootsuite Features

• Content idea generation, planning, and creation
• Unified social inbox and engagement boost
• Social listening and social media sentiment analysis
• Social media analytics and reporting
• Paid ads and organic content management for advertising simplification
• Social networks, apps, and tools integrations

Hootsuite Pricing

• Professional ($99/month)
• Team ($249/month)
• Business ($762/month)
• Enterprise (Custom pricing)

3. Talkwalker

Best known for: Reputation Management, Sentiment Analysis

Talkwalker is a cloud-based Consumer Intelligence Acceleration platform that offers AI-powered social listening tools. Talkwalker’s Consumer Insights executes advanced social media sentiment analysis with technologies that detect complex forms of writing, like sarcasm. Known for its broad coverage the platform lets users break down volumes of data into topics, channels, markets, languages, etc.

Talkwalker Features

• Market research and trend analysis
• Customer experience improvement and brand management
• Social Content Ratings for performance measurement
• Social listening and customer intelligence insights
• Flexible Boolean search with data fragmentation filters
• Campaign strategy planning and monitoring

Talkwalker Pricing

Unfortunately, the website doesn’t provide any pricing information. Instead, it recommends contacting the Talkwalker team for custom plans.

4. Social Searcher

Best known for: Media Monitoring, Social Media Analytics

Social Searcher is a social media search engine that focuses on social media monitoring. It offers tools, like Social Buzz, Google Social Search, Search Users, and Social Trends that track mentions, users, and trends, respectively. Despite the fact that it offers basic coverage, it’s definitely an affordable solution for tight-budget brands and individuals.

Social Searcher Features

• Audience insights and sentiment analysis
• Social mention tracking and trend analysis
• Hashtag tracking and influencer monitoring
• Brand monitoring and email alerts
• Data export and social media monitoring API

Social Searcher Pricing

Social Searcher is one of the best free sentiment analysis tools. However, most features are available in the paid plans that follow:

• Basic (€3.49/month)
• Standard (€8.49/month)
• Professional (€19.49/month)

5. Brandwatch

Best known for: Consumer Intelligence, Social Media Management

Brandwatch is a popular social media management and digital consumer intelligence platform. Basically, it operates with intelligent sentiment analysis software and lets brands see how they’re being perceived by their target audience. Additionally, Brandwatch helps marketers augment brand engagement, by making it easier for them to reply to mentions, messages, and reviews.

Brandwatch Features

• Social media management and unified social inbox
• Consumer intelligence and sentiment analysis
• Brand monitoring and competitor analysis
• Market research and trend analysis
• Crisis management and real-time notifications
• Influencer marketing and stakeholder management

Brandwatch Pricing

Brandwatch doesn’t provide any pricing information, but users can book a meeting with the team.

6. Lexalytics

Best known for: Sentiment Analysis, Natural Language Processing

Lexalytics is an intelligent platform that leverages machine learning and NLP for advanced text analysis. The platform offers a sentiment analysis app, called Semantria API, that allows users to perform sentiment analysis in the cloud. In fact, Lexalytics deals with multiple tech problems and needs, but you need to be a bit tech-savvy to understand.

Lexalytics Features

• Social media monitoring and sentiment analysis in the cloud
• Boolean queries, sentiment phrases, and custom entities
• Unstructured text document storage, management, and analysis
• Text analysis and NLP software libraries integration
• Robotic process automation and AI for data-centric problems
• Part of Speech tagging and text summarization

Lexalytics Pricing

Unfortunately, Lexalytics doesn’t provide any pricing information.

7. Free Sentiment Analyzer

Best known for: Text Analysis, Sentiment Classification

As the name suggests, this is a free sentiment analysis tool, produced by Dr. Daniel Soper. It can be found on his official website, as one of the platform’s free features. Free Sentiment Analyzer allows users to perform sentiment research in any English-written text they manually upload. Afterward, it produces an overall sentiment score, ranging from -100 to +100, indicating an extremely negative and positive tone, respectively.

Sentiment Analyzer Features

There aren’t many different features to be discussed, since this website performs basic sentiment analysis on specific text segments. However, Daniel Soper’s website offers more free tools, such as:

• Word cloud generator
• Statistics calculators
• Financial calculators

Sentiment Analyzer Pricing

There is no pricing information needed, as this is a free sentiment analysis tool.

8. Chattermill

Best known for: Customer Intelligence, Sentiment Analysis

Chattermill is a Unified Customer Intelligence platform that helps multiple teams and industries to streamline their Customer Experience (CX) score. Using its software for theme and sentiment analytics, Chattermill extracts actionable insights from customer support tickets, surveys, and conversations.

Chattermill Features

• Unified customer intelligence and sentiment analysis
• Product and customer feedback analytics
• Customizable dashboards and app integrations
• Impact analysis and Net Promoter Score measurement
• Customer support analytics and social CX insights
• Personalized workflows and custom alerts

Chattermill Pricing

Chattermill’s Starter and Enterprise plans are custom.

9. Keyhole

Best known for: Social Listening, Influencer Tracking

Keyhole is an all-in-one social media analytics and management platform that lets marketers create and share visually appealing reports. Keyhole’s goal is to help brands measure the impact of their marketing efforts, social media campaigns, and hashtags. In fact, their social listening tools offer a sentiment analysis dashboard that groups social posts by sentiment. Users can filter these posts by their social channel and monitor their brand perception online.

Keyhole Features

• Brand monitoring and sentiment analysis
• Influencer marketing and market research
• Campaign monitoring and optimization
• Social listening and reporting
• Social media publishing and scheduling
• Hashtag tracking and analytics

Keyhole Pricing

• SMB & Freelancers ($99/month)
• Corporate ($299/month)
• Agency ($599/month)
• Enterprise (Custom)

10. MonkeyLearn

Best known for: Text Analytics, Data Visualization

MonkeyLearn is a cloud-based text analytics solution that offers a suite of tools, including an advanced sentiment analysis tool. With MonkeyLearn, users are prompted to create their own sentiment analysis model and train it to recognize industry-specific keywords. While this sounds complicated –and requires manual work as well– it’s definitely a unique and valuable take on sentiment analysis.

MonkeyLearn Features

• Text extraction and classification with machine learning
• Sentiment analysis and data visualization
• NPS analysis and customer insights
• VoC analysis and CSAT measurement
• Review, survey, and support ticket analysis
• App integrations and ticket routing

MonkeyLearn Pricing

• Team ($299/month)
• Business (Custom)

Now Over to You

So, that’s all you need to know about social media sentiment analysis tools.

Hopefully, you can now understand the number of ways in which sentiment analysis helps your brand learn, grow, and improve.

Thankfully, you’re not left to perform this kind of magic all by yourself. The platforms discussed above, like Mentionlytics, are some of the best social media sentiment analysis tools in the industry.

Have more questions? Book a free live demo with Mentionlytics and let our experts explain how our social media sentiment analysis software can help you.