Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is the process of determining the emotional tone of what people write: positive, negative or neutral, and sometimes more specific emotions such as frustration or delight. It is usually done with AI across many comments, reviews, messages and mentions, and presented as a share or a trend over time.

For a small business, sentiment helps notice problems and wins earlier than sales numbers do. A sudden rise in negative comments after a price change, a new menu or a delivery delay is a signal to react. Automated tools can misread sarcasm and slang, so always read a sample of the actual comments before drawing conclusions.

Example: a food delivery service reads a month of comments and reviews and sees that most negative ones mention “cold” and “late” on Friday evenings. It adds a courier for Friday peaks, and complaints drop the next month.

Even without a special tool, you can do a simple version by hand: once a month, sort recent comments and messages into positive, negative and neutral, and note the most common reasons for each.