This week on Tech Tuesday, let’s take a closer look at tools that can help you track, measure, and understand social media sentiment.
From identifying trending topics to gauging audience reactions, these tools give you actionable insights that can shape your strategy and drive engagement.
Lexalytics
Lexalytics is an advanced natural language processing (NLP) platform that provides sentiment analysis capabilities suitable for social media and text-centric brand reputation monitoring. It delivers both rules-based and machine-learning-driven approaches to understand how people feel about brands, products, and services—crucial for monitoring social feedback, campaign performance, or customer experience. 
Key Features: Lexalytics offers several deployment options (on-premise, public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid) and supports the Semantria API and Salience engine so you can tailor sentiment analysis to industry-specific vocabularies. It includes features such as sentiment scoring (positive/negative/neutral), entity extraction (identifying people, brands, products etc.), topic/theme extraction, intention detection, and summarization. It supports more than 29 languages, offering POS tagging, categorization, and theme extraction for analyzing large scale social media content with slang, emojis, negations etc.
Best for: Medium to large enterprises or platforms that need customizable, high-accuracy sentiment analysis across diverse languages and social channels. Brands, marketing teams, and social listening platforms that must analyze volume at scale—and want flexibility in vocabulary, context, and deployment environment—will benefit most. Also good for industries with sensitive or regulated content, since you can deploy on-prem or under private cloud.
Hootsuite Sentiment Analysis / Listening Tool
Hootsuite Sentiment Analysis / Listening Tool is a component of the broader Hootsuite social media management platform. It combines social listening, sentiment scoring, and engagement tracking to help brands understand how people feel about their brand, topics, or competitors via social media. It leverages Talkwalker’s technology to power its AI-driven sentiment and emotion insights. 
Key Features: The tool supports automatic classification of sentiment (positive, neutral, negative) for individual messages and overall conversations. Conversations are scored using a model that factors in the last several non-neutral messages to compute overall sentiment. It offers multi-platform listening (public, private, across many social networks), theme/keyword/cloud tracking, trend graphs over time, alerts on sentiment spikes, and reporting. It also allows manual correction of sentiment, supports emotion detection, uses NLP and neural network models, and built-in filters for channels & conversation types.
Best for: Brands, marketers, agencies, and social media teams that already use or plan to use social media management tools and want sentiment insights built into a unified workflow. Excellent for those who want listening + sentiment tied to publishing, engagement & metrics dashboards rather than a standalone tool. Also well suited to teams monitoring many channels & needing cross-platform sentiment visibility with historical trend analysis and alerting.
Brand24
Brand24 is a social listening and brand monitoring platform that includes robust sentiment analysis features—making it well-suited for tracking how audiences feel across social media, blogs, forums, and other online sources. It helps businesses understand public perception in real time, detect issues before they escalate, and benchmark sentiment trends over time. (brand24.com) 
Key Features: Brand24 provides real-time media monitoring (mentions tracking), sentiment classification (positive / negative / neutral), topic and emotion analysis, anomaly detection for sudden changes in sentiment, and reach/share of voice metrics. It features customizable alerts (e.g. when negative sentiment spikes), keyword filtering, dashboard & report exports, influencer scoring, and support for multiple languages. Its newer sentiment models improve accuracy, especially for long posts and context around specific keywords.
Best for: Marketers, PR & communications teams, agency personnel, and brand managers who need to track public sentiment, reputation, or customer feedback across many social channels. It’s especially useful for mid-sized to large organizations that want actionable insights, alerting, and trend analysis (not just raw mentions) to inform strategy, crisis response, or campaign effectiveness.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a comprehensive social media listening and consumer intelligence platform that includes strong sentiment and emotion-analysis capabilities. It gathers data from over 100 million online sources—social media, forums, blogs, news, reviews—and uses advanced NLP and machine-learning models to help brands understand opinion, tone, and emotion behind public conversations about their brand or industry. 
Key Features: Brandwatch supports multilingual sentiment analysis (44 officially supported languages and counting), emotion detection (beyond simple positive/neutral/negative), and includes techniques to better handle slang, emojis, and cultural context. It also offers customizable rules for sentiment classification, trend-analysis dashboards, real-time alerts on sentiment shifts, and image-based insights (recognizing logos/scenes) to extend sentiment beyond text.
Best for: Medium to large enterprises, agencies, and brand management teams that operate globally or across diverse markets. It’s especially useful for organizations needing nuanced understanding of public sentiment—not just volume of mentions but emotional tone and context—with robust reporting, crisis detection, and competitive benchmarking.
Awario
Awario is a social listening and web monitoring platform with solid sentiment analysis capabilities, designed to help brands track how people feel about them across social media, blogs, forums, news, and other online sources. It focuses on capturing mentions and evaluating tone in real time, enabling proactive brand and reputation management. 
Key Features: Awario offers automatic sentiment classification into positive, negative, and neutral categories, with visual mention statistics and trend graphs that show how sentiment evolves over time. It supports multilingual monitoring, boolean-search queries, filtering by reach (to prioritize high-impact mentions), keyword exclusions, competitor sentiment benchmarking, custom alerting (e.g., when negative sentiment spikes), and white-label / exportable reports.
Best for: Marketing, PR, and social media teams at mid-size to large brands who want to monitor brand reputation, campaign feedback, and competitor sentiment in one tool. It’s particularly useful when you need real-time alerts for sentiment changes, customizable filtering, and dashboards to track how public opinion evolves—with enough breadth of data sources and features to support crisis response or trend analysis.
Critical Mention
Critical Mention is a real-time media tracking platform that enables brands to monitor mentions across broadcast (TV & radio), online news, podcasts, and social media. It provides a unified interface for earned media monitoring—including social channels—allowing users to see how their brand is being mentioned across multiple media types.
Key Features: The tool supports keyword search across millions of online news sources plus social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, and tracks mentions across licensed content, print, podcasts, and broadcast. It offers real-time sentiment analysis of media coverage—helping users understand whether mentions are positive, neutral, or negative. The platform includes saved and ad-hoc searches, alerts for sentiment spikes, API access, and allows tracking of context and reach to identify emerging PR issues before they escalate.
Best for: PR teams, communications professionals, brand managers, and marketers who want oversight of the full media spectrum (broadcast, news, social, podcasts) and need to detect and respond to sentiment changes quickly. It’s especially useful when brand reputation, crisis management, or earned media performance are key metrics of interest.
Determ
Determ is a real-time media monitoring and analytics platform that includes robust social media sentiment analysis as one of its core capabilities. It helps brands, PR teams, and agencies track online mentions, understand brand reputation, and respond quickly to shifts in public opinion across social networks and other digital media.
Key Features: Determ provides sentiment analysis (positive / negative / neutral) on social media posts and online media; real-time alerts when mentions spike or sentiment trends change; historical data archives with customizable searches & filters; clippings / screenshot-style coverage; dashboards & PR reports; API access; and competitive & brand monitoring including reach, influence, and engagement metrics.
Best for: Medium to large brands, PR & communications teams, and agencies that need both breadth (many sources, many languages) and speed (real-time alerts) in understanding public sentiment. It’s especially useful for those who manage crisis communications, monitor competitor reputation, or want frequent, detailed reports with customizable dashboards.
ICUC Social Listening & Reporting
ICUC Social Listening & Reporting is a social media listening and brand reputation service that provides sentiment analysis among its core deliverables. Though it functions more as a service rather than a SaaS tool, it combines AI-backed listening plus human analysts to monitor how people talk about a brand, competitors, or topics across social platforms. It serves many channels (Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, etc.). 
Key Features: ICUC provides real-time monitoring of brand mentions across many social and digital platforms; sentiment classification (positive/neutral/negative) plus trend analysis over time; alerts for sentiment spikes or emerging reputational risks; dashboards and reports that include reach, influence, share of voice; and competitive benchmarking. They also offer services like content moderation, online review management, influencer performance tracking, and audience insights. The combination of AI tools and human moderation/analysis ensures context and nuance are preserved.
Best for: Brands, public relations teams, and marketing departments that prefer a managed service (i.e. outsourcing the listening + analysis) rather than managing a tool in-house. Especially valuable for organizations that need 24/7 monitoring, crisis response, and want sentiment insights delivered with human analysis to interpret nuance (slang, cultural context, etc.). Also useful for companies operating in regulated or sensitive industries where accuracy and context matter.
Onclusive Social
Onclusive Social is a media intelligence and social listening platform that offers comprehensive social media sentiment analysis across brand, competitor, and topic conversations. It tracks conversations across many social media platforms—including TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook etc.—as well as earned and owned media, giving brands a broad view of how they’re perceived online. 
Key Features: Its Social Listening module provides real-time monitoring and analysis of billions of online conversations. It offers sentiment scoring (positive / neutral / negative) in over 100 languages; trend detection such as sentiment spikes; historical search (24 months of data) with unlimited searches; alerts; influencer tracking; and dashboards/reports that combine volume, sentiment, reach, and impact metrics. It also identifies emerging issues, allows filtering by source, platform, and keyword tags.
Best for: PR & Communications teams, marketing managers, enterprises and brands that need both depth and breadth in listening. It works well for organizations operating across markets or languages, and those wanting alerts and dashboards for reputation risk, crisis detection, or tracking competitive / topic trends. Especially useful when linking media sentiment to earned media performance.
Synthesio
Synthesio (by Ipsos) is a social listening and consumer intelligence platform that provides advanced sentiment analysis among its core capabilities. It helps brands monitor and interpret public opinion across social media, news, reviews, and other online sources—enabling reputation tracking, crisis detection, and insights into consumer conversation trends. 
Key Features: Synthesio includes Automated Sentiment Analysis (ASA), which classifies social media mentions into positive, negative, or neutral tone using machine-learning models built with context sensitivity (including incorporating bidirectional models like BERT). It supports multilingual sentiment detection, semantic AI (extracting entities, topics, expressions) and large data-set coverage—covering large social sources plus search, reviews, visual content. Trend detection, dashboards, alerting on sentiment/volume spikes, influencer & audience insights are also part of its offering.
Best for: Medium to large brands, agencies, and marketing or communications teams that need sophisticated sentiment insight across multiple languages, content types, and high-volume sources. It is particularly strong when you want both automated sentiment scores and richer context (themes, emerging entities) to support decision-making in reputation, customer experience, or competitive intelligence.
YouScan
YouScan is a social listening and consumer intelligence platform that enables brands to monitor millions of online conversations—social media posts, blogs, forums, and especially image-based content—to derive sentiment, brand reputation signals, and influencer metrics. It uses AI both for text and visual content, making it strong for tracking what people are saying and showing about a brand.
Key Features: YouScan supports real-time tracking of brand mentions across social media, blogs, forums, and images (using logo detection in visuals). Its AI-driven sentiment analysis classifies consumer attitudes (positive / negative / neutral), offers instant alerts for sentiment spikes or reputation risks, and an “Insights Copilot” assistant for querying trends and emerging topics. It also has influencer discovery, audience demographics analysis, and filtering by keyword, platform, or interest to hone in on specific sentiment streams.
Best for: Brand management, marketing, or PR teams in mid-to-large organizations that need depth in both text + visual sentiment, especially for product or brand campaigns where visual user content matters (e.g. fashion, FMCG, drinks). Also useful for those wanting alerting and reputation risk management with nuanced visual cues, not just text mentions.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a social listening and consumer intelligence platform known for its high-fidelity sentiment analysis across social media, news, reviews, and online forums. It emphasizes not only detecting whether sentiment is positive, neutral, or negative, but also identifying nuances—like sarcasm, slang, and emotional tone—across many languages and contexts.
Key Features: Talkwalker offers real-time sentiment classification of online content across social media, news media, reviews, and more; its “Blue Silk™” AI-powered sentiment model handles over 180 languages, with support for detecting basic sarcasm and emotional nuance. The platform also provides alerts for negative or high-risk posts, trend detection (i.e. sentiment shifts), topic / theme extraction, and analytics dashboards showing sentiment over time, by geography, by product/topic etc.
Best for: Brands, PR & communications teams, marketing departments, and agencies operating at scale who need robust sentiment coverage across many languages and content types. Especially valuable when you need to detect reputation risk early (thanks to the sarcasm / nuance detection), benchmark sentiment versus competitors, or gain insights from visual or multimedia content. For teams needing deep social listening + sentiment with strong context, Talkwalker is a top contender.
BrandBastion
BrandBastion is a social media moderation, listening, and sentiment-analytics platform designed especially for brands, DTC (direct-to-consumer) companies, and agencies. It offers sentiment & analytics tools that help businesses understand how audiences are reacting across paid and organic content, enabling more precise responses to public feedback and helping protect brand reputation.
Key Features: BrandBastion employs AI-powered sentiment analysis that’s customized to each brand’s voice, industry, and audience to handle nuances like sarcasm, subtext, emojis, and context. It also offers real-time tracking and alerting (for sentiment shifts or spikes), dashboards & visualizations of sentiment trends, and support for both organic and paid content. Additional features include image sentiment (detecting visuals or creative components), workflows for managing comment moderation, community management tools, and the ability to analyze sentiment in context of the full conversation or creative content.
Best for: Brands, marketing teams, agencies, or social media/digital experience teams that need sentiment analysis not just of text but of visuals and in the context of paid/organic mix. Especially good for businesses with high comment or ad volumes, communities that need moderation, or those wanting to improve creative messaging or social ad performance through feedback.
Semrush AI Toolkit (formerly the AI SEO Toolkit)
Semrush AI Toolkit (formerly the AI SEO Toolkit) is a module within the Semrush suite that provides brand visibility, perception, and sentiment insights—particularly focused on how brands are represented in AI-powered search results, large language models (LLMs), and related content. It aims to measure not just what people are saying, but how AI‐based tools and responses are shaping brand image and perception online. 
Key Features: The toolkit offers a Brand Performance report that surfaces sentiment, key attributes, and topics associated with your brand in AI-generated responses. It includes visibility metrics—how often a brand is mentioned in AI-search or LLM outputs vs. competitors—and prompt tracking, letting users monitor specific prompts to see how their brand appears or is omitted. It also provides trend dashboards, sentiment over time, and alerts or reports that help identify perception changes in AI contexts.
Best for: Marketing leaders, SEO and content strategists, and brand managers who are interested in understanding how their brand is perceived in the AI search landscape rather than just traditional social media or search signals. It works well for organizations wanting to track sentiment associated with AI-generated responses, prompt visibility, competitive comparison, and how that perception evolves—especially useful if your brand is investing in content or presence that feeds into AI/LLM visibility.
Zappi Brand Tracking
Zappi Brand Tracking is a brand and market data platform that offers continuous brand health and perception tracking; while its primary focus isn’t pure sentiment analysis, it does have relevant features that intersect with sentiment-oriented listening. The solution gives real-time metrics like awareness, consideration, mental equity, and tracks how brands and categories are performing via consumer feedback surveys.
Key Features: Zappi provides continuous, real-time tracking of brand health KPIs (awareness, consideration, category/brand drivers) using pre-built or customizable survey templates. It allows cross-brand and category benchmarking for up to ~15 brands, real-time reporting dashboards, trend charts, and data exports. Its setup is designed for speed and affordability compared to traditional brand tracking/market research, offering continuous coverage rather than sporadic pulses.
Best for: Brands, marketing teams, and product teams interested in understanding how their brand (and competitors) are viewed over time from the consumer perspective—not just in social media text sentiment, but in broader perception metrics. Especially useful for those that need trend-tracking, benchmarking, category insight, and regular feedback (surveys) rather than unstructured social text listening alone.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social offers a comprehensive social media management platform with built-in sentiment analysis and listening tools designed to help brands monitor sentiment, reputation, and trends across channels. Sprout’s tools allow teams to track mentions, reviews, and conversations, automatically classify sentiment (positive, neutral, negative), and spot when things shift—making it easier to respond rapidly to feedback and engage proactively. 
Key Features: Sprout Social includes Smart Inbox and Reviews Feed features that tag or filter messages based on sentiment. Its Social Listening module allows building queries to monitor keywords, campaigns, or topics, giving sentiment trends over time. The platform also supports manual reclassification of sentiment, sentiment rulesets (e.g. correcting sentiment misclassifications in context), multilingual sentiment analysis, alerting on sentiment spikes, and dashboards for trend visualisation.
Best for: Brands, marketing teams, and social media managers who need an all-in-one tool combining publishing, engagement, listening and sentiment analysis. Especially useful for those operating across multiple platforms and needing real-time alerts, sentiment filtering in their inbox/reviews workflows, and visual reports/insights that link public perception to campaigns or customer support. Sprout is well suited to medium to large organizations that want both usability and depth in social sentiment tracking.
Chatmeter
Chatmeter is a reputation management and brand intelligence platform that includes advanced sentiment analysis (via its “Pulse” tool) designed especially for multi-location brands, franchises, and chains. It collects feedback from online reviews, comments, and social media channels to let brands monitor their reputation at both the national and local level, spotting sentiment trends and issues that matter most. 
Key Features: Chatmeter’s Pulse uses AI and natural language processing to analyze unstructured customer feedback—reviews, comments etc.—and classifies sentiment (positive / negative / neutral). It supports custom topic tracking (letting brands define specific subjects they want to monitor), location-based insights (to compare sentiment by store or region), real-time alerts for sentiment spikes, and dashboards for trend visualization. The platform also provides review and listing management (e.g. Google Reviews, Yelp etc.), competitive intelligence, and integrations with BI tools for deeper reporting.
Best for: Brand managers, PR teams, and customer experience professionals in multi-location or franchise businesses who need visibility into how sentiment varies by location and topic. Particularly useful for companies managing dozens or hundreds of locations, dealing with high volumes of reviews and online feedback, or needing rapid alerting and topic-level insights to address local issues before they escalate.
Comparison Table – Best Social Media Sentiment Analysis Tools
| Tool | Core Focus | Key Sentiment Features | Languages / Content Types | Best For |
| Lexalytics | NLP platform for social & text-centric reputation monitoring | Rules-based + ML sentiment scoring, entity/topic extraction, intention detection, summarization | 29+ languages; on-prem/cloud/hybrid | Medium–large enterprises needing customizable, high-accuracy sentiment analysis across social channels |
| Hootsuite Sentiment Analysis / Listening | Sentiment + social listening inside Hootsuite | Auto sentiment classification, theme/keyword tracking, emotion detection, manual correction, trend graphs & alerts | Multi-platform social channels (powered by Talkwalker) | Brands & agencies already using social management who want sentiment inside one dashboard |
| Brand24 | Social listening & brand monitoring | Real-time mentions, sentiment classification, topic/emotion analysis, anomaly detection, alerts, influencer scoring | Multi-language; social + blogs/forums | Mid-size to large teams needing actionable insights & alerts on sentiment trends |
| Brandwatch | Consumer intelligence & deep social listening | Multilingual sentiment & emotion detection, slang/emoji handling, image/logo recognition, trend dashboards & alerts | 44+ languages; social + forums/blogs/news | Global enterprises & agencies needing nuanced understanding of public sentiment and competitive benchmarking |
| Awario | Social listening & web monitoring | Auto sentiment (pos/neg/neutral), trend graphs, boolean queries, reach filtering, competitor benchmarking, alerts | Multilingual; social + web/news/forums | Mid-size brands needing real-time alerts and customizable dashboards for sentiment change |
| Critical Mention | Real-time media tracking (broadcast + online) | Sentiment analysis across TV, radio, podcasts, online news & social; alerts; context & reach metrics | Broadcast + online + social | PR/comms teams needing unified view of earned media sentiment |
| Determ | Real-time media monitoring & analytics | Social + online sentiment, real-time alerts, historical archives, dashboards, API access | Multi-language, many sources | Medium–large brands & agencies needing breadth + speed in public sentiment monitoring |
| ICUC Social Listening & Reporting | Managed listening & sentiment analysis service | Real-time monitoring across many platforms, AI+human moderation, trend analysis, influencer tracking, dashboards | Social + digital (Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit etc.) | Organizations wanting outsourced 24/7 monitoring with nuanced, human-checked sentiment insights |
| Onclusive Social | Media intelligence & social listening | Sentiment scoring (100+ languages), trend detection, 24-month historical search, alerts, influencer tracking, dashboards | Social + earned & owned media | Enterprises & PR teams needing depth + breadth, reputation risk & crisis detection dashboards |
| Synthesio (Ipsos) | Social listening & consumer intelligence | Automated Sentiment Analysis (BERT-based), semantic AI, entity/topic extraction, trend detection, alerts, influencer insights | Multi-language; social + reviews/search/visual content | Mid-large brands & agencies needing high-volume, sophisticated sentiment & theme insights |
| YouScan | Social listening with visual analysis | AI text + visual sentiment, logo detection in images, instant alerts, Insights Copilot, influencer discovery | Social + blogs/forums + images | Mid-large orgs needing both text & visual sentiment for brand campaigns |
| Talkwalker | High-fidelity sentiment analysis | Blue Silk™ AI sentiment (180+ languages), sarcasm/nuance detection, alerts, topic/theme extraction, dashboards by geography/product | Social + news + reviews + multimedia | Brands/agencies needing robust, nuanced sentiment coverage and early reputation risk detection |
| BrandBastion | Sentiment analytics + moderation (paid & organic content) | AI sentiment tuned to brand voice, emoji/sarcasm handling, real-time tracking & alerts, dashboards, image sentiment, community management workflows | Social (paid + organic) | Brands & agencies with high comment/ad volume needing sentiment + moderation in context |
| Semrush AI Toolkit | Sentiment in AI search/LLM landscape | Brand Performance report (sentiment & attributes in AI responses), prompt tracking, visibility metrics, trend dashboards & alerts | AI-search and LLM outputs vs competitors | Marketers/SEO strategists tracking brand sentiment in AI search rather than traditional social |
| Zappi Brand Tracking | Continuous brand health/perception tracking (survey-based) | Real-time brand KPIs (awareness, consideration), benchmarking, trend dashboards; not pure NLP sentiment | Survey respondents (not unstructured social posts) | Teams wanting ongoing perception metrics & benchmarking rather than automated social sentiment |
| Sprout Social | All-in-one social management + sentiment | Smart Inbox & Reviews sentiment tagging, Social Listening queries, multilingual sentiment, manual reclassification, alerts & dashboards | Social & reviews across multiple platforms | Medium-large orgs wanting publishing + engagement + sentiment in one platform |
| Chatmeter | Multi-location reputation intelligence | AI (Pulse) sentiment on reviews/comments/social, location-based insights, custom topic tracking, real-time alerts, dashboards | Reviews, social, multi-location | Multi-location brands/franchises needing sentiment by region & rapid issue detection |
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