Sentiment Analysis: Overview, Applications and Benefits

Mining such data to determine how people feel about your product, brand, or service, is called Sentiment Analysis. When applied to social media channels, it can be used to identify spikes in sentiment, thereby allowing you to identify potential product advocates or social media influencers. Companies such as Microsoft, IBM and smaller emerging companies offer REST APIs that integrate easily with your existing software applications. For example, using the following publicly available Sentiment Analysis REST API from a small start-up called Social Opinion, we pass in the text, "this phone is awesome", to the following URL: In the response, we can see the text has been identified as expressing positive emotion, with a 64% probability of that being true.