What is sentiment?
Sentiment is the tone of the attention your brand receives: positive, neutral, or negative. Where reach counts how often you are mentioned, sentiment tells you how people write about you. It shows whether media attention strengthens your reputation or damages it, and how that develops over time.
Written by Timon Hendriks · Last updated on 12 July 2026
How it works in practice
Sentiment is measured by scoring publications and posts on tone, nowadays mostly automatically with language models that label each mention positive, neutral, or negative. Automated analysis is fast but not flawless: irony, nuance, and jargon still get misread. Check the mentions that matter yourself.
The value lies in the pattern and the change. A brand that structurally appears in neutral coverage can work toward a more positive profile with opinion and research. A sudden sentiment drop is an early alarm: whoever spots it fast can respond before an issue grows into a crisis.
Example
A Tampa HVAC company sees its sentiment suddenly drop in monitoring: on a consumer forum and in a regional paper, customers complain about long waits after a hurricane weekend. Management responds the same week with a public update on the approach and calls the affected customers personally. A month later sentiment is back at its old level, including a positive follow-up in the same paper.
Common mistake
Watching only the average sentiment and missing the outliers. One influential negative article can do more damage than ten positive mentions repair; look at who is writing and with what reach.
Frequently asked questions
How is sentiment measured?
Monitoring tools automatically score every mention as positive, neutral, or negative based on the language used. For important publications a human check stays wise, because irony and nuance remain hard.
What do you do about negative sentiment?
First understand the source: who wrote it, is the criticism valid, and how large is the reach? Respond factually where it helps, fix the underlying problem, and then actively build positive stories.