Social Networking is the medium widely used for expressing emotions and opinions in public life through smart phones and other mediums on the Internet. Amongst the popular portals is the Twitter. Twitter has been the point of attraction to several people in research in important areas like prediction of democratic electoral events, consumer brands, movie collections at box office, stock market, celebrities etc. Opinion mining also called as sentiment analysis offers a fast and broader way of monitoring the public sentiments. In this paper, a study on various perspectives and approaches of Twitter data analysis being carried out in recent years using opinion mining is made by considering the words, retweets, hashtags and emoticons.