Top 10 Social Listening and Sentiment Analysis Tools
By: Trapica Content Team
Tags: Audience Insights, Brand Messaging, Customer Service, Social Listening, Sentiment Analysis

When it comes to marketing tools, it’s fair to say that social media is fairly unique. Essentially, it’s a lead generation platform that also allows us to generate exposure, communicate with customers, share stories, collaborate with other brands, and more.

In the past, we’ve seen several companies endlessly reply to social media posts without really knowing (or even checking) if their strategy is working. Posting to social media is great, but a strategy needs to have two things:

Relevance to the target market

Social listening

We’ve spoken about making social media strategies relevant to a target audience before, so now we want to explore the idea of social listening and sentiment analysis.

What’s Social Listening and Sentiment Analysis?

Essentially discussing the same process, these two terms describe the idea of monitoring how a brand is represented on social media. Are the feedback and comments overwhelmingly positive or mostly negative? Sometimes, it’s not good enough to look at numbers alone. The brand may have received 3,000 mentions on Twitter, but what if the vast majority of these were complaints? Numbers don’t always tell the full story, which is where sentiment analysis comes in.

Benefits of Sentiment Analysis

Often, sentiment analysis is said to keep its eye on ‘social sentiment,’ which means what people are saying about a brand online. But why is this important? Let’s look at a few of the benefits of investing your time and money into this area, and then we’ll offer ten brilliant social listening tools that will help in this journey.

Customer Service — The last thing you want is for negative sentiment to spread. By keeping an eye on what is being said, you have an opportunity to deal with small issues before they become major problems and a threat to the whole business. If we look at a hotel or a restaurant as an example, negative reviews have the potential to shut a business down. With all B2C operations, customer feedback and reviews are pivotal when good. When bad, we need a strategy in place to deal with them.

If you can deal with negative reviews in the right way, you can transform a poor experience into a positive one. Social listening is simply the process you need to bridge the gap.

Audience Insights — Before technology, businesses didn’t know what the customers really wanted. Now we have all the information we could possibly want freely available on social media. Plenty of companies have recently learned that customers want eco-friendly packaging and products. If you use sentiment analysis correctly, you will understand your target market better than ever.

Brand Messaging — You can assess the social sentiment of competitors to decide on the right brand messages at the right times. What is the competition doing to get the all-important positive sentiment? What are they doing to get the negative sentiment? What can you learn from this to keep your social media reputation on the positive side?

Ten Brilliant Sentiment Analysis Tools

Now that we understand the purpose of sentiment analysis, and the benefits it has to offer, here are ten tools that will help you (in no particular order).

People Browser

To start, we want to mention People Browser because it covers all the basics. As soon as a brand is set up with the platform, they will be able to find every mention of their company on social media. They will also be able to track competitors and the industry as a whole. Another reason why People Browser is popular is because they allow for tracking during marketing campaigns. How has a specific marketing campaign affected mentions? Find out with People Browser.

2. Google Analytics

Next, we’ll follow with a suggestion that you may have already expected. As one of the best free analytics tools on the internet, we couldn’t let this one go. As you discover where your buyers and subscribers originate, Google Analytics allows us to generate reports, keep records of marketing actions, and more. If we really want to break down visitor details, we can do so while learning about the online experiences our customers have.

3. HootSuite

Another free tool, and one that seems to have many different sides, is HootSuite. In our opinion, it’s worth investing the extra $6 per month to get access to a Premium membership because it allows for more in-depth analytics. As many others will tell you, HootSuite has everything you need to not only manage but also measure social media.

4. Meltwater

There are two facets to Meltwater: they allow users to uncover insights about their target audience AND they provide an overview of how people are talking about the brand. By looking into the tone of the overall commentary, Meltwater indicates the reputation of the brand according to the people. By using this analysis, we can then create a strategy depending on whether we need to encourage more positive feedbackm or deal with a negative wave of attention.

5. Google Alerts

We return to the mega name of Google, and this time it’s with their Alerts software. Within seconds, you can start tracking search queries, which provides insights into your target market just as we’ve seen before. When setting up Google Alerts, you can decide to be notified on whatever search queries you choose. Rather than manually searching, everything comes to you with this tool. While some track competitors, others look for industry trends and influencers.

6. Digimind

According to the company itself, Digimind is all about understanding three things: the competitive environment, the market trends, and customer insights. As an intelligence software, Digimind has grown in recent years — one reason being their ability to transform data into actionable insights. With AI Sense, the platform uses artificial intelligence to create reports on any topic you desire.

7. Mentionlytics

Designed especially for small businesses and even startups, Mentionlytics has the advantage of being incredibly simple to use. Offering a free trial, users are able to see mention insights as well as find influencers. Not only can you track mentions to your company, you can do it for individual products — which is essential when starting out in any industry.

8. RapidMiner

As a data science platform, the focus on RapidMiner is very much on the numbers. With machine learning and so many other capabilities, they have also extended into the social listening scene, so we’d recommend their platform to anyone who needs help in this area. According to the company themselves, their services spread across all sorts of industries whether you’re in retail, eCommerce, comms, automotive, financial services, manufacturing, travel, or logistics.

9. Samsung

You might be surprised to see this name on the list, but they actually have a presence in the market through their work with Crimson Hexagon, an AI consumer insights company. With the might of Samsung behind them, this tool has become one of the leading social media analytics platforms and they now actually work with some huge brands. As well as machine learning, they offer a data library, audience analysis, image analysis, emotion analysis, sentiment analysis, and social account monitoring.

10. BrandWatch

As our final suggestion, BrandWatch can make sense of the many voices on the crowded online space. You will be able to assess what customers think about your own brand and benchmark this against what people are saying about the competition. We love that if you and your team aren’t sure about fit, you can book a meeting with their team. They will explain how BrandWatch works and how your business can leverage their many features.

Read More: Top 10 Targeting Platforms

Which Is Best?

We know, your next question is likely to be ‘which is best?’ out of all the suggestions above. In our opinion, you can’t go wrong with any of the names in our list. We recommend taking advantage of the free trials, talking to your team, and choosing the platform that allows you to complete sentiment analysis to a level that you’re happy with.

In 2020, it’s more important than ever to stay on top of what people are saying about your brand. Especially with influencers, who can sway the opinions of thousands at a time, you need to understand what people are saying, and take action when the situation demands. With the right analysis tool, you can stay on top of social media at all times and take more control over your reputation in this online sphere!

Bonus! Marketing Tools for Marketers:

2. Bilbi AI: Daily Marketing Campaign Insights