Every post matters: A survey on applications of sentiment analysis in social media

Social media is often used by people to express their views about everything around them. Twitter is considered as a major microblogging site where each post by the user is publicly available. Due to the public availability, it makes Twitter the most popular social media for analysis of opinions of the masses for various purposes. These purposes range from predicting an election winner to identifying the polarity of people towards a particular brand. This paper provides an introduction to Sentiment Analysis and the importance of pre-processing of texts in social media. With a detailed description of how performance evaluation is done, it looks into research works which make use of Twitter data in order to obtain insightful details in various domains and help identify the trending research areas within Social Media Analysis.