What social media monitoring tool should I use?

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Hi,

There are certainly a lot of social media monitoring tools out there in the market these days!

At the start of the year we blogged on an evaluation of tools that we tested; http://www.rmmlondon.com/archive/social-media-monitoring-tools-we-take-a-test-drive

We found that the choice of tool will be driven by the objectives you have for monitoring (daily monitoring to support customer response, historical research etc).

"One of the most frequent objectives of social media monitoring is to enable customer response to mentions of a brand, product or service – i.e. what’s happening right now?  We found that combining a tool such as Sysomos Heartbeats or Sentiment Metrics with a good old-fashioned Google Alerts and Twitter search will provide a scalable solution that scrapes a decent breadth of the web to help keep on top of what the world is saying.

For other clients, there’s a greater focus on comparison analysis and research across a wide range of topics, often looking back historically. For this, we found that tools such as SM2 Techrigy provide considerable flexibility in helping extract and monitor trends over time between user-defined categories.

Another use of monitoring tools, particularly for an agency like ourselves, is to support ad hoc research to provide a client with a snap shot of what’s being said about their brand, for example to support a sales pitch. For a cost effective “toe in the water”, SM2 Techrigy’s free service or Radian6’s seven day profile package (if the data is being used for pitch purposes only) can cater for such a requirement.

Of course, great functionality is one thing, but value for money is always something that requires careful consideration. We found two main cost models – based either on the number of search phrases that can be setup, or the capacity of search results. To make the correct choice, it’s again essential to ensure a clear understanding of the client’s needs and objectives and to run some testing of what search volumes are likely. For example, if the client wants to search under a large number of different terms we found BrandWatch, Techrigy and Radian6’s pricing models work well. When a client wishes to search a smaller number of high volume search terms, then Sysomos and Sentiment Metrics pricing models seemed better suited.

While the majority of tools come in at around the £350-£400 a month mark, we also checked out the budget end of the market with tools such as Viralheat. Such tools may lack the analytical and reporting capability of their more expensive counterparts, but at £10/month, provide far more structure and organisation of search results than a plain Google search."

The only slight caveat is that this evaluation was run in Dec 2009, so there will be some new ones on the market since then.

There are certainly many tools that enable you use them for just a few months (or even a month at a time), which don't have a setup fee.

I hope this info is useful.

Thanks

Simon