The practice of assessing whether mentions of a brand or topic in social media, reviews, or other text are generally positive, negative, or neutral in tone — often done at scale using automated tools rather than manually reading every mention.
Why it matters
Sentiment analysis gives a quick, scalable read on how a brand is perceived, especially useful for spotting a shift in tone following a specific event (a product launch, a price change, a PR issue) that would be difficult to track by manually reading thousands of individual mentions.
In a sentence
"Sentiment analysis showed a clear dip right after the price increase announcement, even though overall mention volume didn't change much."
Related terms
- Often confused with: Social listening (sentiment analysis is a specific analytical technique for classifying the tone of mentions; social listening is the broader practice of monitoring conversation generally, of which sentiment analysis is often one component).