AI Sentiment Analysis

Who It's For

The custom AI sentiment analysis platform we develop is designed for organisations that need to monitor their digital reputation at scale and cannot afford to do it manually:

• Marketing and communications teams at mid-to-large companies running multichannel campaigns who need to measure the impact of their actions in real time
• PR and communications agencies managing the reputation of multiple clients simultaneously and needing a single centralised control panel
• Brand managers in retail and hospitality where reviews on Google, TripAdvisor, or Amazon directly impact conversions and bookings
• Press offices and social media managers who must identify emerging crises before they go viral
• Political research and public affairs teams monitoring public opinion for campaigns and institutional organisations
• Customer experience managers who want to transform unstructured feedback (comments, reviews, messages) into actionable insights
• Large restaurant chains, hotel groups, and retail networks with dozens or hundreds of locations to monitor centrally

We do not sell a generic monthly-subscription tool: we build the system around your specific channels, target languages, competitors, and KPIs.

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Problems It Solves

The data volume is unmanageable manually

A mid-sized brand receives hundreds of mentions every day, scattered across dozens of different platforms. Monitoring Twitter/X, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Google Reviews, TripAdvisor, Trustpilot, Amazon, and major forums would require an army of analysts — or a smart automated system. Our platform aggregates everything into a single dashboard, automatically classifies each mention, and calculates sentiment scores with accuracy exceeding 90%.

Reputation crises are discovered too late

When a negative post starts spreading, every hour lost makes things worse. Manual monitoring systems — someone checks social media occasionally — are wholly inadequate. Our system sends real-time notifications via email, SMS, or webhook the moment the volume of negative mentions exceeds a configurable threshold or when a specific critical topic emerges.

Data is fragmented and incomparable

Organisations typically collect data from different tools that do not talk to each other: one tool for Google Reviews, another for social, an Excel sheet for monthly reports. The result is a fragmented picture, always days behind. Our platform unifies everything in a single data layer, with queryable history and period-over-period comparisons.

No visibility on what competitors are doing

Analysing only your own brand is not enough. The most sophisticated organisations want to know how they stack up against competitors: who receives more positive mentions? On which topics are competitors criticised? Where is there a positioning opportunity? The competitor benchmarking module answers these questions with objective data.

Reporting takes hours of manual work

Preparing a monthly online reputation report typically requires hours of data collection, Excel formatting, and chart building. Our platform automatically generates customised PDF and Excel reports, ready to be shared with management or agency clients.

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Key Features

Multilingual NLP — Understanding Text the Way a Human Does

The core of the system is the Natural Language Processing engine we have trained on sector-specific and language-specific corpora. We natively support Italian, English, French, German, and Spanish, with additional languages available on request.

The sentiment classifier does not simply look for positive or negative keywords: it understands context, negation ("not bad at all" = positive), simple irony, and idiomatic constructions. For specific domains — such as hospitality or food — we train vertical models that know the sector's terminology and can distinguish an excellent dining experience from a mediocre one even when the reviewer uses technical terms.

Classifier outputs:

• Sentiment score from -1.0 (strongly negative) to +1.0 (strongly positive)
• Three-way classification: positive / negative / neutral
• Primary emotion detection: joy, anger, disappointment, surprise, fear
• Entity extraction: products mentioned, locations, people, hashtags
• Automatic language detection

Real-Time Social Media Monitoring

We connect the platform to official APIs and authorised crawlers to cover:

• Twitter/X: direct mentions, branded hashtags, keyword monitoring, relevant threads
• Instagram: post comments, Stories mentions, branded and industry hashtags
• Facebook: page comments, public posts, relevant public groups
• LinkedIn: company mentions, relevant posts and comments
• TikTok: videos with brand hashtags or mentions, comments
• YouTube: comments on branded videos and videos that mention the brand
• Forums and communities: Reddit, configurable sector-specific forums

Every mention is captured within minutes of publication, enriched with metadata (author follower count, post engagement rate, estimated reach), and automatically classified.

Review Analysis on Specialist Platforms

Reviews are a fundamental and often under-exploited source of insight. We integrate:

• Google Business Profile: all reviews across all locations, with AI-assisted response drafting
• TripAdvisor: hotel, restaurant, and attraction reviews
• Trustpilot: company reviews, with integrated response capability
• Amazon: product reviews, Q&A
• Booking.com and Airbnb: for accommodation providers
• App stores (Apple and Google Play): for companies with mobile apps

For each platform we extract the numerical rating, review text, date, author nationality where available, and calculate temporal trends to identify whether perception is improving or deteriorating.

Real-Time Dashboard with Sentiment Scores

The dashboard is the operational heart of the platform. Designed to be reviewed every morning in 5 minutes, it shows:

• Global sentiment score for the current day vs yesterday vs last week
• Mention volume by channel and sentiment
• Trending topics: the most discussed themes in the last 24h / 7d / 30d
• Geographic map of mentions for multi-location brands
• Top mentions: the posts with the highest reach or engagement requiring attention
• Hourly heatmap: when your brand is discussed throughout the day
• Competitor comparison: sentiment scores and mention volume side by side

The dashboard is fully customisable by role: the CMO sees strategic KPIs, the social media manager sees operational detail, the CEO sees the executive summary.

Automatic Reputation Crisis Alerts

The alerting system is configurable at multiple levels:

• Volume alerts: when negative mentions exceed N units per hour
• Sentiment alerts: when the score drops below a configurable threshold
• Keyword alerts: when a specific term emerges (an executive's name, a product in crisis, a sensitive word)
• Reach alerts: when a negative post reaches an estimated view threshold
• Emerging topic alerts: when the clustering system detects a new theme growing rapidly

Alerts are delivered via email, SMS, Slack, Teams, or webhooks to any incident management system. Each alert includes full context (post screenshot, transcript, direct link) to enable an immediate, informed response.

Topic Clustering and Trend Detection

Beyond sentiment classification, the system automatically groups mentions by theme. This answers questions like:

• "What do customers who give us 1 star on Google mainly complain about?"
• "Which product feature receives the most positive mentions?"
• "Is there an emerging problem with our customer support?"

Clustering uses topic modelling algorithms (LDA + BERTopic) that automatically identify the main themes without any manual configuration. Trends are visualised as time series: you can clearly see when a theme emerges, grows, and then subsides.

Competitor Benchmarking

We monitor up to 10 configurable competitors with the same indicators used for your brand:

• Comparative sentiment score over time
• Share of voice (% of total industry mentions)
• Positive and negative themes for each competitor
• Benchmark on average ratings across review platforms
• Opportunity identification: themes where competitors receive criticism that you can leverage

This information becomes invaluable input for communication and product strategy.

PDF/Excel Report Export

Every report is automatically generated with your brand identity (logo, colours, naming) and structured for the target audience:

• Monthly executive report (4-6 page PDF): key KPIs, trends, highlights and lowlights, recommendations
• Weekly operational report (Excel): raw data, all mentions, sortable and filterable
• Competitor report (PDF): quarterly benchmark with comparative analysis
• Crisis report (generated on demand): event timeline, evolution analysis, estimated impact

GDPR and EU AI Act — Native Compliance

Collecting and processing data from social media and review platforms must meet strict regulatory requirements:

GDPR (EU Reg. 2016/679):

• We collect only publicly accessible data; we never access private messages
• Automatic anonymisation of personal data in reports and dashboards (hashed usernames, blurred profile pictures)
• Configurable data retention: after X days, data is aggregated and individual information deleted
• Pre-compiled Records of Processing Activities (Art. 30 GDPR) for the platform
• DPIA (Data Protection Impact Assessment) available as a supporting document for your DPO

EU AI Act (EU Reg. 2024/1689):

• The sentiment analysis system falls under the low-risk category under the AI Act
• Algorithmic transparency: model documentation, bias tests, accuracy metrics available
• The system is not used for individual profiling or automated decisions with legal effects
• Full prediction logging for auditability

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Typical Workflow

Here is how the platform works in the daily practice of a marketing team:

Morning (5 minutes): The social media manager opens the dashboard and sees the 24-hour sentiment score. Everything stable? No alerts incoming? Move on to regular work. Is there a negative spike? Open the detail, read the most impactful mentions, assess whether and how to respond.

During the day: Automatic alerts notify the team when something relevant emerges, without needing to constantly check. The system works 24/7.

End of week: The system automatically generates the weekly report and sends it by email to configured recipients. The manager reviews it, adds notes if needed, and shares it with the CMO.

End of month: The executive monthly report is generated, reviewed, and presented to management with month's trends, competitor comparison, and recommendations for the coming month.

During a crisis: The team receives a real-time alert. The platform shows minute-by-minute evolution of mentions, estimated reach, and the channels of greatest spread. The communications team has all the data to build an effective response quickly.

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Possible Integrations

The platform we build is not an island: it connects with the tools your organisation already uses:

• CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics): a negative mention from an existing customer can automatically create a ticket in the CRM
• Slack and Microsoft Teams: alerts and digests directly in team channels
• Jira and Asana: automatic task creation when a crisis emerges that needs managing
• Google Data Studio / Looker Studio: data feed for existing company dashboards
• Power BI: native connector for advanced analytics
• Mailchimp / HubSpot Marketing: campaign triggers based on sentiment changes
• REST API: any custom system can read data in real time via documented API
• Webhooks: push notifications to any listening system

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Custom vs Off-the-Shelf

There are SaaS tools for social monitoring on the market (Brandwatch, Mention, Talkwalker, Sprout Social). Why choose a custom system?

Limitations of standard SaaS solutions:

• Pricing plans based on mention volume: costs explode for high-awareness brands
• NLP optimised for English; significantly lower performance for Italian and other European languages with their nuances and idioms
• No ability to train the model on your specific sector
• Integrations limited to predefined connectors
• No dashboard or report customisation for your brand identity
• Data hosted on servers outside the EU, with data sovereignty implications
• Vendor dependency: if the SaaS provider shuts down or changes policy, you lose everything

Advantages of Graffico custom development:

• NLP model specifically trained on your sector and your target audience
• Fixed development cost plus hosting, with no variable costs tied to volume
• Fully customisable data sources: monitor niche sources too (sector forums, specific news sites, public newsletters)
• Dashboard and reports with your brand identity, ready to deliver to your clients (for agencies)
• Data hosted in Italy or the EU on infrastructure you control
• Full code ownership: you are never at the mercy of a vendor
• Ability to evolve the system over time (new channels, new features) without changing tools

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Timeline, Budget & Process

How We Work

Our process always begins with a thorough analysis of your specific needs:

1. Discovery (1-2 weeks): Understanding your channels, competitors, KPIs, required integrations, and expected data volumes 2. Design (2-3 weeks): Technical architecture, dashboard design, data model definition, API specifications 3. MVP Development (6-10 weeks): First working version with core features: crawlers, classifier, dashboard, alerts 4. Model Training (2-3 weeks, in parallel): Gathering training data specific to your sector, fine-tuning the NLP classifier, validating accuracy 5. Testing and Go-Live (2 weeks): Load testing, accuracy testing, team training, phased go-live 6. Continuous Evolution: Monthly sprints to add features, improve models, integrate new channels

Indicative Budget

Costs depend heavily on complexity: number of channels to monitor, data volumes, target language, required integrations.

• Basic setup (3-5 social channels + 2 review platforms, 1 language, standard dashboard): indicatively €18,000 – €30,000
• Intermediate setup (all main channels, multilingual, competitor monitoring, CRM/Slack integrations): indicatively €30,000 – €55,000
• Enterprise setup (very high volume, custom models for specific sector, agency white-label, complex integrations): from €55,000 upward

Monthly hosting costs (servers, APIs, storage) vary by volume: typically €300 – €1,500/month.

Contact us for a tailored quote: the initial discovery is always free.