Text, sentiment, and social analytics help you tune in, at scale, to the voice of the customer, patient, public, and market. The technologies are applied in an array of industries — in healthcare, finance, media, and consumer markets. They distill business insight from online, social, and enterprise data sources.

It’s useful stuff, insight extracted from text, audio, images, and connections.

The analytics state-of-the-art is pretty good although uptake in certain areas — digital analytics and market research are examples — has lagged. But even in areas of strong adoption such as customer experience and social listening and engagement, there’s room for growth, for both technical innovation and more-of-the-same uptake. This market space means opportunity for new entrants and established players alike.

We could examine each analytics species in isolation, but better to look at the full, combined impact area. The technologies and applications overlap. Social analyses that neglect sentiment are incomplete, and to get at online, social, and survey sentiment, you need text analytics.

This article, a look-ahead technology and market assessment, surveys high points for the year to come, with a run-down of —

10 text, sentiment, and social analytics trends to watch for in 2016

Every one of these trends will affect you, whether directly — if you’re a text, sentiment, or social analytics researcher, solution provider, or user — or indirectly, because analysis of human data is now woven into the technology fabric we rely on every day. The common thread is more data, used more effectively, to create machine intelligence that changes lives.