Twitter analytics is a classic research area especially with the widespread presence of Big Data in various online media such as—social network sites, online portals for shopping, e-commerce, forums, chats, recommendation systems, and online services. Ascertaining the sentiment behind, the various types of tweets by different persons can provide great insights on various aspects including behavioral patterns. Besides highlighting the newest trends in the field, we retrieved real-time twitter data pertaining to three currently popular hashtags in the Indian context and carried out extensive experimentation analysis about the prevailing sentiment of a strata of population. Inclusion of current challenges, future trends and applications of sentiment analysis from Twitter data makes this novel work very useful for fellow researchers. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.