  Social media serves as a unified platform for users to express their thoughts
on subjects ranging from their daily lives to their opinion on consumer brands
and products. These users wield an enormous influence in shaping the opinions
of other consumers and influence brand perception, brand loyalty and brand
advocacy. In this paper, we analyze the opinion of 19M Twitter users towards 62
popular industries, encompassing 12,898 enterprise and consumer brands, as well
as associated subject matter topics, via sentiment analysis of 330M tweets over
a period spanning a month. We find that users tend to be most positive towards
manufacturing and most negative towards service industries. In addition, they
tend to be more positive or negative when interacting with brands than
generally on Twitter. We also find that sentiment towards brands within an
industry varies greatly and we demonstrate this using two industries as use
cases. In addition, we discover that there is no strong correlation between
topic sentiments of different industries, demonstrating that topic sentiments
are highly dependent on the context of the industry that they are mentioned in.
We demonstrate the value of such an analysis in order to assess the impact of
brands on social media. We hope that this initial study will prove valuable for
both researchers and companies in understanding users' perception of
industries, brands and associated topics and encourage more research in this
field.
