I’ve posted tutorial/resources about the Technical Side of Sentiment Analysis on this Blog. Here are the Links, if you need them:

LingPipe (Java Based) | Python | R language resource | Microsoft’s Tool “Social Analytics”

Apart from this, I’ve used other Tools per project requirements and It’s been fun designing and developing projects on “Sentiment Analysis” primarily using Social Media Monitoring. Having worked with clients on projects that use “Sentiment Analysis” – I reflected about the role of Sentiment Analysis in Social Media Monitoring. And in this blog post, I am sharing these reflections:

What is Social Media Monitoring?

Social Media Monitoring is a process of “monitoring” conversations happening on social media channels about your brand/company.

Is it NEW? Not really. The idea of monitoring or gathering data about what is being talked about the brand/company is not new. Earlier, it was newspapers and magazine-articles and now, it’s the social media channels including online news, forums and blogs and thus the name given to this process is “Social Media Monitoring”

What is Sentiment Analysis?

Analyzing data to categorize it under a “sentiment” (emotion).

Example. Is this review saying positive, negative or neutral thing about our product.

side-note: Sentiment analysis is often categorized under “Big Data Analytics”.

What’s the Role of Sentiment Analysis in Social Media Monitoring?

We’ve seen that in social media monitoring, we gather all online conversations about a brand/product/company. Now wouldn’t it be great to take the data that we have and bucket it under “Positive”, “Negative” or “Neutral” categories for further analysis?

So few questions that can be answered after we have results from sentiment analysis:

1) Are people happy or sad about our product?

2) What do they like about our product?

3) What do they hate about our service?

4) Is there a trend or seasonality in sentiment data?

Among other business insights that may be not be easily answerable with just plain text data.

Thus sentiment analysis is one of the step in social media monitoring that assists in analyzing sentiment of all the conversations happening on the social web about a brand/product.

That’s about this for this post. Here’s a related post: Three Data Collection Tips for Social Media Analytics

your comments are very welcome!