Owing to the rising popularity of social networking sites and chat-based applications, visual sentiment clues such as emoticons are increasingly being used in blogs, tweets, games, and product reviews. The existing sentiment analysis tools mainly focus on predicting the polarity based on textual content, and displaying the results in the form of graphs or charts. In this paper, we propose a system to account for emoticons and exclamation marks along with words while performing sentiment analysis of the input text. The output of this analysis is represented on a unique figure, which we define as an ‘emoticon-graph’. An online survey was conducted to collect product and news reviews to analyze the sentiment and also to evaluate the acceptance of the ‘emoticon-graph’. The findings of this survey indicate that dynamically plotted emoticon-graphs could play a major role in simplifying the results of polarity determination methods. © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016.