If you read this blog regularly, you know that I think that monitoring social media is one of four key aspects of a social media engagement strategy.
Social media monitoring is a way to figure out what’s being said about your brand and reveals opportunities for engaging in conversations with customers and influencers. At its most basic, social media monitoring starts with what is known as the “vanity search.” Through one of the popular search engines, you set up a recurring search on key terms that will alert you to relevant online discussions of your brand, your competitors, and influencers.
But things can quickly get complicated from there. For example, what if your brand or offering uses a generic term like “Service Oriented Architecture”? How do you separate the specific discussions about your offering from the general conversation?
Furthermore, a vanity search cannot distinguish whether what’s being said about your brand is coming from a blogger with 2000 readers that include your most important customers or from a grad student whose RSS feed goes to his Mom.
The good news is that online conversation is captured forever within the bowels of a server somewhere, just waiting to be analyzed to death. The bad news is that gaining real insight from that data is difficult—though a horde of software developers is working on it.
Social media monitoring software is a fast-growing category of tools designed to slice up online conversations to try to determine things like where conversations about your brand occur most often, or how much you are being talked about versus your competitors.
Since many of the monitoring tools are new, most are available as Software as a Service (SaaS) over the internet, which makes it easy for marketers to try them out. Yet this same newness means that few are integrated with the software that marketers already have, such as CRM.
Here are some of the ways that these tools give marketers more insight into online conversations:
- Determine tone and sentiment. Some developers are using algorithms and analysis to determine whether conversations are positive or negative and whether the individuals within the conversation are supporters or detractors. But the developers acknowledge that using computers to determine the tone of human conversation is still a work in progress at this point. For example, the tools can’t distinguish between tongue-in-cheek sarcasm and criticism.
- Assign a response. Some of the tools let you define the types of comments or conversations that deserve a response, flag them, and route them to a designated person for action.
- See the distribution of conversation. Most of the tools let you segment the different types of social media to determine where conversations are happening—such as blogs vs. Facebook.
- Trend the conversation. Some of the tools let you analyze the direction and popularity of conversations over time. This is helpful during important periods like new offering launches or in the aftermath of a crisis.
- Determine share of attention. You can track the amount of conversation about you versus your competitors.
- Identify influential sources. The tools can determine the popularity of conversations and the sources of those conversations. This helps you decide which blogs you’d like to do outreach with, for example.
- Locate the conversations. Some of the tools let you see the geographic locations of people involved in the conversation.
- Track propagation. Track a comment from a blog post all the way through to mainstream media.
Here is a list of companies that do some form of social media monitoring, by category:
Search tools:
- Backtype
- Blogdigger
- BlogPulse (Nielsen)
- IceRocket
- Plazoo
- PostRank
- Socialmention
- Technorati
- Twingly
- Yacktrack
Microblogging search:
Discussion Forum Search
Comprehensive (so they say) tools:
- Alterian (Techrigy) SM2
- Attentio
- Biz360
- BrandsEye
- BuzzDing!
- BuzzLogic
- BuzzNumbers
- BuzzStream
- Chartbeat
- Collective Intellect
- Compete
- Digimind
- Filtrbox
- ImpactWatch
- Infegy
- ListenLogic
- MediaMiser
- Networked Insights
- Nielsen NetRatings
- Onalytica
- Opinmind
- Radian6
- Rapleaf
- ReputationDefender
- ReputationHQ
- Scout Labs
- Sentiment Metrics
- Sprinklr
- Steprep
- Tealium
- TNS Cymfony
- Trakur
- Trendrr
- Viralheat
- Visible Technologies
- Vocus
- White Noise
- Zuberance
Sources: ITSMA research, Ben Barren, Murray Newlands, pier314, socialmediamonitoring.ca, social media monitoring wiki.
What have I left out? Please let me know in the comments.
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- 25 Social Media Monitoring Companies You Want to Know About (benbarren.com)
A few free ones are missing as well. YackTrack, SocialMention and FiltrBox are a few that I can think of. (Disclosure, I am the creator of YackTrack)
Thanks, Rob. I’ll add those to the list.
[...] from a wide variety of companies. Chris Koch in his B2B blog has written an article called Eight Reasons to Monitor Social Media and a list of tools for doing it that I felt was worthy of [...]
[...] you measure success? You can find an extensive listing of recently-available measurement tools here; but if your goals include lead generation, check out our summary of a Tom Pick post about [...]
[...] most often, or how much you are being talked about versus your competitors,” says Chris Koch in a recent post on his B2B blog. Many of these new tools are available as SaaS (Software as a Service) over the Internet, making [...]
Thanks for including ListenLogic in your list. We do provide a comprehensive tool, and even include a dedicated analyst for each account.
Thanks again for listing us!
-
http://www.ListenLogic.com
http://www.twitter.com/listenlogic
[...] Social Media Monitoring Software and How to Use It | Chris Koch’s B2B Blog http://www.christopherakoch.com/2009/12/eight-reasons-social-media-monitoring-software/comment-page-... [...]
Great article! Couldn't agree more with the metrics that you put forth: share of attention, trending, sentiment, etc. You are right, a key filter is the influence of said source, be it a blogger or a twitterer. You can't possibly respond to everyone, so it's important to “triage”, and influence and reach help you do that. In Biz360 Community platform, we allow to isolate by sentiment, source type (blog, Twitter, etc), and sort by impact.
Thanks for including us in the list! Reach out anytime you like, to chat about SM monitoring and measurement.
Maria Ogneva, Biz360 Social Media
@themaria @biz360
YourVersion.com is also a cool real-time social discovery engine. Yourversion allows you to search webpages, blogs and twitter comments relevant to your specific interest.
Nice article Chris.A great list of tools and the ways that these tools give marketers more insight into online conversations.Really a huge list.
Very informative article….!!
Thanks, Jack! I appreciate the kudos.
[...] (You can find a veritable compendium of social media monitoring software tools in a fairly recent post by Chris Koch over on his B2B Marketing Blog.) Listening is critical to understanding brand, competitors and [...]
There's so much useful information there but I'm wondering whether any tools yet exist that help those of us who want to monitor numerous types of phrases on Twitter, on behalf of clients. Tweetdeck works to a certain extent, but who wants to scroll through columns of searches? In my case, I have about 50 clients and a few phrases related to each client that would be great to keep track of if there was an easy way to do it.
In my mind it would be an application that had a current day view (and history) of all uses of the chosen phrases, all together on one screen (perhaps with some scrolling) so there's minimal amounts of hunting around.
Perhaps such a product exists – it'd certainly make my life easier!
Andy,
You should consider some of the comprehensive tools listed here. There are many available for monitoring multiple phrases at once.