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Top1. Introduction
The inexorably growing nature and dynamism of the Internet in terms of the volume, speed and variety of opinionated information published online has made sentiment analytics (SA) a trending practice for many organizations seeking to facilitate decision making and provide actionable information for domain analysts (Yue, Chen, Li, Zuo, & Yin, 2019). Over the past decade, both research studies and practical applications in SA have gradually increased as the Web has evolved from a passive content provider to an active, socially aware repository and disseminator of collective intelligence. This evolving collaborative web (commonly referred to as Web 2.0), augmented by web-based technologies such as social media networks (e.g., Twitter and Facebook), enables users to build social networks based on professional relationships, interests, and experiences (Chauhan, Sharma, & Sikka, 2020; Zainuddin, Selamat, & Ibrahim, 2018). As such, social media networks foster a broader range of creative expression, facilitate collaborative work practices, enable community development and knowledge sharing, and create an engaging landscape in which organizations can connect with authentic audiences through a variety of tools and technologies (Dridi & Reforgiato Recupero, 2019; Kumar & Jaiswal, 2020; Păvăloaia, Teodor, Fotache, & Danileţ, 2019).
The purpose of this study is to provide an in-depth understanding of the current state of research on organizational adoption of SA in the context of social media networks through a systematic literature review (SLR) of relevant studies and examination of existing research findings and challenges. However, given the vast and diverse literature on SA adoption, this review study does not attempt to provide a comprehensive enumeration of research findings or SA methods. Rather, it aims to use the power of SLR to explore and classify the wealth of literature on SA to identify key factors that support the successful and effective adoption of SA in the social media context. Specifically, the current study aims to answer four research questions; namely, 1) what factors determine the successful and effective adoption of SA in the social media context; 2) what are the predominant sentiment analysis methods that are widely used in social media; 3) what are the application areas of sentiment analysis techniques and how can sentiment research in social media help solve various business problems; and 4) what are the research directions of sentiment analysis.
A key difference of this study from previous review studies is that it uses the SLR method to identify and evaluate the rich literature on organizational adoption of SA. Traditionally, the extant research on SA has used the SLR method to provide discussions of existing SA techniques, such as lexicon-based and machine learning methods (Dhaoui, Webster, & Tan, 2017; Ravi & Ravi, 2015; L. Zhang, Wang, & Liu, 2018). While this represents a significant advancement in the field of SA, part of the challenge for the research and business communities is that SA-based technologies have been developed with limited consideration of the technical and organizational intricacies associated with the adoption process and the factors that drive successful adoption of SA in social media (Hussein, 2018; Rambocas & Pacheco Barney, 2018; N. Singh et al., 2020; Swain & Cao, 2019). In general, SA technologies have the potential to transform online text/posts/reviews/tweets/comments into a sentiment-rich source of information that enables efficient and effective decision making (N. Singh et al., 2020; Tartir & Abdul-Nabi, 2017). Nonetheless, their benefits and capabilities can only be fully realized if these promising innovative technologies are successfully and widely used to extract tacit, new, and useful knowledge from the vast amount of online corpora on the social web, which are typically sparse, ironic, sarcastic, ambiguous, or composed of non-standard vocabulary (Sykora, Elayan, & Jackson, 2020). Therefore, analyzing relevant literature and examining research findings and challenges related to organizational adoption of SA in the context of social media is warranted to provide guidance for subsequent studies in this research strand.