Sentiment Analysis and Metrics: Free & Paid Tools – Part 2

November 19, 2010 | by | Category:

Web 2.0: What are consumers saying about your brand?

As the Web grows increasingly more social, more consumers are moving their traditionally offline brand discussions–both promotional and critical–online. As a result, more and more businesses are looking for ways to engage with their online audience and monitor what they are saying about their particular brand in this public, global space.

While smaller businesses might be able to track these conversations manually with tools like Google Alerts, many find themselves inundated with more tweets, updates and reviews across multiple social channels then they can keep up with. For online marketers facing large volumes of opinions, but looking to sift through the data and learn from customer feedback, sentiment analysis tools can serve as an excellent solution.

Sentiment Analysis Tools: Free and Paid

There are a variety of sentiment analysis tools available now. Some are stand-alone, some are attached to specific social media applications. Depending on the level of depth and reporting, different tools make sense. Some let viewers see the top positive and top negative posts. That lets forceful strong opinions come to your attention. What you want to see before you sign up are a few key statistics:

  • How many sources are surveyed? If you’re only interested in tracking conversations about your brand across Twitter, then a Twitter-specific sentiment analysis tool might be perfect for you. However, most companies will want to monitor sentiment analysis across additional social media sites (like Facebook), blogs and mainstream media. Make sure to look into how many sources a tool tracks before investing time and money in it.
  • How customizable are searches? Sentiment analysis isn’t uniform across all businesses. If your company is interested in a more advanced analysis of language, for instance, such as positive or negative sentiment, or intensity of a user’s remarks, then a more sophisticated tool and adjustable filters might be needed.
  • How many keywords can be tracked? Some tools might have a limit that’s too restrictive for the volume of keywords you’re looking to monitor. Research how many keywords can be tracked by a tool before moving forward with it. For instance, one tool’s free trial might only allow you to track two keywords, whereas another might permit up to 10 keywords.
  • Can geographic, demographic and language parameters be specified? Depending on your business and your target audience, these factors might be highly relevant. Do you need a sentiment analysis tool to track your international and local SEO, in addition to your US-focused keyword strategy?
  • Can you specify certain blogs and social media sites that are important to one’s customers or industry opinion-makers? For companies who are already keeping their eyes and ears open for consumer feedback across various sources, they may very well have a top ten list of blogs they scan or a social networking site they’re primarily interested in.
  • Are there free trials or free sign ups? Want to try it before you buy it? Free trials are a great idea for getting introduced to the various sentiment analysis tools out there.
  • And of course, what is the cost? For many businesses, social media budgets are at the bottom of the list. There are a lot of great paid sentiment analysis tools out there, but it’s important to look at your budget allotment, and then evaluate which tool is the most financially practical for your social media monitoring efforts.

Seven Sentiment Analysis Tools to Check Out:

  1. OpenAmplify: In the company’s words it is a “technology company specializing in natural language processing and text analysis.”
  2. Social Mention: “Social Media Alerts: Like Google Alerts but for social media.”
  3. Amplified Analytics: This tool is geared primarily toward product reviews and marketers interested in tracking those reviews across multiple sites. Free trial, no registration required.
  4. Jodange: “Automatically filters and aggregates thoughts, feelings and statements from traditional and social media.” Offers a 30-day free trial.
  5. Lithium: Lithium Social Media Monitoring: “It’s easy to configure, works in real-time, and finds the best stuff from millions of social media sources.” Offers a free, 14-day trial with sign up.
  6. SAS Sentiment Analysis Manager: Part of SAS Text Analytics program, the Sentiment Analysis Manager: “crawls content sources, including mainstream Web sites and social media outlets, as well as internal organizational text sources…[it] creates reports that describe the expressed feelings of consumers, customers and competitors in real time.”
  7. Trackur: “Trackur is an online reputation & social media monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the internet.” Claims more than 27,000 users. Offers a free plan with sign up, as well as a 10-day money back guarantee with any paid plan.

Have experience with any of these tools, or want to let us know about any other tools? Share your thoughts and feedback with us.

Disclaimer
Optify is a real time marketing applications suite which offers several features to help you track, monitor and measure the success of your social media activities. Optify does not provide a sentiment analysis utility. We do periodically cover subjects that our product offering does not provide a direct solution for. We select particular topics for our blog based on whether we determine the topic has an impact on online marketing in general, or if a specific solution is an effective utility for our online marketing customers, followers and readers.