10 Social Media Monitoring Tools for Measuring Social Media Analytics
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“I always tell people when they start talking about ROI on Social Media, well, what’s the Return On Ignoring?”
- Jeffrey Hayzlett, Kodak.
Social Media Monitoring ? That’s an often heard but a meaningless term to many of us, right ? Many think that there is no ROI to Social Media, and while this topic is up for debate, I’m saying – yes and no.
No because, we know that we don’t get social for the game sake. And yes because, there are brands and products who needs numbers and obviously results, for getting social.
Many brands are jumping into the social media bandwagon these days and are experimenting with things, that’s a fact. Many a times, knowingly or unknowingly we have engaged with them as well. So it makes sense for them to monitor it and see what the results are like.
Having said that, monitoring social media is not the regular analytics stuff, that’s where many go wrong.
- Social Media shouldn’t be measured like SEO analytics on your site.
Heck, you won’t even see the referrals as good as an SEM campaign with social media. The thing is, in social media the action is elsewhere and not necessarily does reflect on your site referral stats all the time. Now, don’t get me wrong but I’m not trying to say that if you have something to sell, at the end of the day, it doesn’t. In fact it might sell, but just that the numbers might not look round as in an SEO analytics report.
- Social Media measurement has got to do with many “intangible” signals.
Now, this is a grey area but measuring social media (at least at this point of time) has got a lot to do with “intangible” or “volatile” signals. Like “feel good factor” for a brand, which can be perceived if you ask someone about it but never shows up in the referral stats.
- Social Media monitoring is probably a better word than Social Media measurement.
Why ? Because social media isn’t always about the numbers and formulas. Its more about the “perception”, “engagement” and “emotions”.
Phew ! I hope all that made sense. Now, on to some social media monitoring tools.
Honestly, many of these tools are “not-really-there”. But these are the ones we have anyways. They mostly focus on the numbers unfortunately, while some focus is also give to brand perceptions and engagement ratios. I’d like to see more tools coming up that focuses on the second part rather than the numbers. But that require some level of intelligence and I guess we’re all in a learning mode at the moment.
1. Radian6 – Social Media Monitoring Tool
Ridian6 is a popular social media monitoring tool that helps you track quite a lot of signals and get insights into your brands performance on various social media channels. They cover almost all the social media channels like blogs, twitter and facebook. It provides detailed analytics reports and charts, perfect for that presentation you want to pull off.
2. Alterian Social Media Monitoring Tools
Alterian’s SM2 social media monitoring tool is one that gives advanced user behavior statistics, measures and analyze daily volume, demographics, location, positive or negative content tone, themes, and trending topics for your brand/product. A little too much details but a good tool nevertheless. This one too, covers a range of social media channels like digg/linkedin/facebook/twitter/delicious etc.
3. ScoutLabs Web based Social Media Monitoring Tool
An eye candy this one. Scout Labs social media monitoring tool is web based, and with an interface like Google Analytics it tracks almost all the online social media channels. It measures all the negative/positive signals and gives you reports based on the overall performaces.
4. Real Time Social Media Monitoring Tool – Self Service
Self-service analytics software supports both qualitative and quantitative research, providing automated semantic analytics to allow you to explore insights and opinions about your products and brands on social media. It claims that the platform automatically captures large, relevant data sets through topic categorization.
5. Social Mention – Web based social media monitoring
Social Mention is a web based tool that makes it simple. It finds the brand mentions on any particular channel like blog/micro blogs and gives you a comprehensive idea of how the brand is perceived by users. It also gives you idea about the general “perception” of the brand in terms like positive, negative or neutral.
6. Brands Eye – Web based Social Media Measuring tool
This one is a bit different from the rest of the lot. It picks up signals from social media mentions and puts them into a different perspective unlike others. It finds you details about reputation, media origin and sentiments associated to your brand. Impressive !
7. Trendrr – Real Time Social Media Monitoring tool
Trendrr is a very web 3.0 kind app that does real time digital/social media monitoring for you. It analyzes social media channels for your brand mentions and puts them into perspective with numbers. Their data sources include everything from Blogs to Microblogs, Search, Social Networks and even Video.
8. Spark – Social Media Monitoring Visualizer tool
Spiral16′s spark takes social media analytics to a higher level, making it visual and thus making it easy to interpret and compare. They claim that the data is not the regular one, not limited to RSS feeds as a data source, instead combines proprietary crawler technology with public search engines. Spark captures a wider breadth of data and more goes into more detail about web pages, resulting in less spam and more relevant results.
8. MAP – Social Media Analytics Tool
Sysomos’s MAP – Media Analytics Program is another social media analytics program that focuses on the core concepts of social media – listen > measure > understand and engage. The tool provides real-time intelligence to manage products, brands and reputations on social media.
9. Attentio – Social Media Trends / Analytics Tool
Basically what attentio does is collect information from all social media channels related to brands and products, assimilate and study it to give you structured data. Its advantage is that its multilingual and have more of a brand centric focus.
10. DNA 13 Media Monitoring Tool
DNA 13′s media monitoring tool focuses more on a comprehensive media coverage model much like a PR tool. While I’m not a big fan of this model, the tool sure gives us a lot of insight on how and why a brand is performing well/bad on the media channels. They claim that they could provide a TV, print, online news, social media, and RSS feeds, all in one location “umbrella” strategy, which is interesting.
So, Which is the best Social Media Monitoring Tool out there ?
There is no one single social media measuring tool. You have here a bunch of the best social media monitoring tools out there. As I said, most of them do the same job of indexing and finding your brand in the discussions, but the ones that excel do a good job at finding value out of those analytics data, and putting things to perspective. The idea is to mix and match and make use of the best ones from the lot.
If you know more of such tools, please do let me know 
thanks for the tools!
http://www.swixhq.com/SWIX.html saw this one a while ago, see http://a3m.posterous.com/analytics-for-social-media-bam
You should check out PostRank. It does a better job than most of the above. Also, keep your eyes on Keen Kong, who is still in beta, but ought to be great !
Hello Mani.
This is certainly a great compilation of social media analytics tools. You’re right, more than measuring, social media trends and progress, they needs to be studied. They are in itself a tool to gauge the recognition of your business and personal brand.
Great round up of tools. Another great tool is called swix.. we also did a blog post on that: http://www.youbrandinc.com/social-media/analytics-for-social-media/
Thanks for including Radian6 in your list
We’re always happy to chat about how to measure the ROI of your efforts in social media, as well as how social media monitoring can be tied into things like CRM systems or web analytics programs. A lot of this stuff IS able to be measured.
Pleasure Katie. Found Radian6 very interesting. Looking forward to a working license
We do have a 7-day free trial program if you’re interested. Feel free to email me to chat further if you are.
really good! thanks
Hi Mani,
Nice write-up of a number of tools. Another one to get on your radar is Filtrbox (now part of Jive Software). It offers real-time monitoring and analytics of social media, online news, forums, etc (7 categories of media). Real-time alerts are critical for timely engagement, as is spam filtering and noise control. Stay turned for news of our next release as well – some very exciting additions to the platform.
Best,
Ari Newman
Filtrbox Founder & Jive Director
Will keep an eye on it Ari
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Hi Mani,
You might also like to know about Infegy’s Social Radar (http://www.infegy.com/socialradar.php), the social web analytics platform for enterprise customers. SocialRadar Alerts (http://www.socialradaralerts.com) are also available as both a standalone service and as a new feature to the Social Radar analytics platform for enterprise customers. Infegy’s Social Radar Alerts provide brand marketers with a “hands-off” approach to staying on top of what is being said about their brand or any important topic across the social web. If you’d like a demo, email alison at infegy.com
Hi Mani,
Thanks for the excellent blog post and for including Alterian SM2 in your list! You are right to say that social media monitoring is a key part of any plan to “play” on the social web. To your point about SMM being in “learning” mode… I think you find that there are a lot of really exciting things coming out of our industry this year. I also think that we are still in a time when many people are struggling to figure out what to DO with all of this information. I know this is something that we strive to help our customers understand.
Cheers!
Hi,
Thank you for including Alterian SM2.
The challenge that many find with measurement is that they can count the the number of conversations but determining the ROI is a challenge because companies don’t know what the value of a conversation is.
On the qualitative side these tools are good at burbling up the main topics by using textual analysis. That is valuable for seeing trends. And our tool has automatic sentiment and tone which provides some very interesting information on customer service, product development, and feelings about advertisements.
Thanks for the list..
Well.. still I’m not aware of this Social Media Monitoring? and Why we need this…? As a SEO Analyst, how it is going to help us…?
Please write one blog post about this or comment here…
hmmm No Answer for question.. I think you are so busy in your works… Carry on…
Thanks for including Sysomos on the list. In addition to MAP, Sysomos also provides Heartbeat, a social media and monitoring service. MAP is an analytics and in-depth reporting tool for agencies looking to meet the needs of multiple clients, as well as companies that want to monitor a wide variety of products and services. Heartbeat is a user-friendly, flexible and cost-effective monitoring tool. More information about both services can be found here: http://www.sysomos.com/products
cheers, Mark
Mark Evans
Director of Communications
Sysomos Inc.
@Mani – I’m curious, out of the 100s of monitoring solutions what factors you used to choose these 10? Certainly there are some great solutions here, all that offer a little bit different approach, so your methodology certainly interests me.
You said that, “Because social media isn’t always about the numbers and formulas. Its more about the ‘perception’, ‘engagement’ and ‘emotions’.”
I would like to offer that it’s about more than that as well. That it’s about taking the numbers, the perception, the engagement, etc. and extracting points of emphasis, emergent themes, and actionable items and then leveraging the information you acquired from monitoring to enhance your approach, marketing strategy, customer service, etc.
While some CRM solutions are starting to pop up as components of monitoring solutions, it’s extremely difficult for a system to distinguish actionable insights. This is where we still believe the human analyst component is integral to brand success.
Please let me know if you’d like to discuss further.
Thanks for sharing your insights about our space!
Quality of data is a big deal for our customers, as is the ability to visualize data insight in different ways. Thanks for including Spiral16 on this list! Customizing the data and drilling down are also important. To answer Albert’s question from above, being able to gather unique business intelligence from all over the Web is pretty powerful stuff. Thanks again, Mani!
Eric Melin
@Spiral16
@SceneStealrEric
Find the ROI in the social media ? need to wait two years more, but we have one more ROI that is a good news.
Hi Mani,
Nice list, very detailed and almost complete
I recently built a social media monitoring tool myself. With this tool you can track and monitor in 1 click of a button, your website social media exposure on more than 20 top social media sites. Among the crawled social websites are; social news, bookmarking, networks, file / video sharing, review sites, etc.
It would be great it you testdrived it. Please let me know your thought and opinion;
http://www.socialwebsiteanalyzer.com
Good luck and keep up the good work. Erwin
Thanks for the great tools, Mani! Social media is awesome. I’m glad you’ve devoted a post to this.
Good stuff, Mani. No, social media can’t be measured in the same way as SEO or any other online marketing endeavor – you are right, not everything is going to be going back to your site or blog. Creating and engaging in outpost communities all over the social web is just as important. However… Although awareness is a bit fuzzier than actual actions on the web (going to a site, signing up, etc), it can still be measured. For example, if I measure the number of mentions of my brand vs. competitive brands, and especially if I do it over time, I will know who is saying what about me, and how many times. I can also track what’s going with my competitors’ share of voice, and if there are any events that are driving sudden spikes or declines. I do this daily for our brand (Biz360) and our competitors. Measuring sentiment can also help you inch towards understanding of that fuzzy good vs. bad feeling that people have towards you, or your competitors. We are actually using our software to figure out who will get voted off American Idol, based on sentiment and number of mentions – it’s been a really fun project – http://idolstats.com
Next time you review additional platforms, I encourage you to give Biz360 a spin. Contact me offline to get it set up.
Maria Ogneva, Biz360
@themaria @biz360
Great list of tools you have there. Thought you may also want to add Brandtology to the list of social media monitoring solutions.
We are one of the largest Business and Brand Online Intelligence service providers that combines technology, processes and trained professionals to deliver accurate and relevant intelligence to global organizations.
Data is useless unless someone works on it and derives actionable insights out of it. Be it for advertising planning, marketing strategy, product development or fine-tuning of ongoing campaigns, social media data is invaluable to astute companies out there. Thats what we help many of our clients with here at Brandtology, because we dont just shove them a DIY system, but we go the full mile with them to advise and gather the insights and recommendations for them.
Thanks.
Ashley Lim
Social Media Consultant
Brandtology
i agree http://www.swixhq.com/SWIX.html is a great tool.
if you need something added just contact their support and they work it out within a day!
i asked for facebook fan pages to be added and within less than 8 hours they had it up and working!!!
great great team over there!
Hi there, Mani!
I wanted to let you know about what we do at uberVU: we track blogs, news sites, Twitter, photo and video sharing sites, forums (and more) to provide a full view about the relevant mentions online. We also show you how people reacted to what was said about a specific topic, and if you add the sentiment analysis, there you have it – a way to filter data so that you can concentrate on the relevant content and be able to “digg” through all the www noise.
Thanks for this list!
I want to track particular users activity about my sites or link or keywords… Is it possible in your app?
Well, no, for the time being it is not possible to track a certain user’s activity..
Thanks… I think I can expect in future…
Hey Mani,
Very helpful info. Thanks
Thanks for the quality of your’s articles. Its was true that you sell this blog?
I use spredfast.com
These tools will help user to track the data more. G8!
Great to see Alterian’s Social Media Monitoring tool – SM2 – being mntioned.
Cheers mate,
Damien
I believe none of these tool are made available free for use but its great to have this list for future use.
Al least some of them has a demo.
Social Report (www.socialreport.com is another good tool to try. You basically have a utility to track social network account performance just the same way you do with websites.
Try out Actionly (http://www.actionly.com) -Social Media Monitoring dashboard and listening platform. We offer real time graphs, reporting and we even have a free account for those who want to try us out!
Thanks!
Is there a free SM software for those of us looking at options to get into it full time.
Thanks for sharing this wonderful tools. Could you please let me know this tools how helpful to SEO analysts?