Regarding Twitter sentiment analysis, the top performing system  from Semeval-2013 Twittter Sentiment Analysis task (Nakov et al., 2013) follows this recipe by training an SVM on various surface form, sentiment and semantic features.
with more than 40 systems participating in Semeval-2014 challenge, we note that the majority of systems perform well only on few test sets at once while failing on the others 5 .