{"id":2866,"date":"2021-04-17T22:10:17","date_gmt":"2021-04-17T22:10:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.britopian.com\/?p=2866"},"modified":"2024-02-02T18:13:34","modified_gmt":"2024-02-02T18:13:34","slug":"social-media-monitoring-tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.britopian.com\/social-data-analytics\/social-media-monitoring-tools\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Media Monitoring Tools: Strategic Guide for 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"
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[Updated February 2024]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Key Takeaways<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Below is a table of the top Social Media Monitoring Tools and software. Click here<\/a> to read more below. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Platform<\/th>Key Features<\/th><\/tr><\/thead>
All Ears<\/td>All Ears focuses on audio and video social listening, analyzing content across platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Podcasts using AI for transcription, sentiment analysis, and real-time alerts.<\/td><\/tr>
Talkwalker<\/td>Social listening tool with a built-in, ready-to-use social media command center. Combines machine learning and human insights to extract actionable insights from social media content and other platforms.<\/td><\/tr>
Brandwatch<\/td>Tracks, analyzes and understands social media conversations. Provides insights into brand mentions, sources, mention volume, and demographic data. Offers sentiment analysis and competitive intelligence.<\/td><\/tr>
YouScan<\/td>Excels in image recognition capabilities. Provides audience insights and evaluates sponsorship activities by analyzing branded social media posts, mentions, and user-generated content.<\/td><\/tr>
Synthesio<\/td>Provides social listening dashboards and social media command centers for data visualizations and monitoring of real-time trends, events, and conversations. Offers audience management feature and Topic Modeling.<\/td><\/tr>
Pulsar<\/td>Offers four parts of its social listening software\u2013TRENDS, TRAC, CORE, and RESEARCH. Provides data visualization of social media trends, advanced social listening with keyword, content tracking, and audience segmentation.<\/td><\/tr>
Digimind<\/td>Integrates Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn post-level data. Uses AI-enabled social listening technology for tagging sentiment analysis and visual listening. Provides multiple ways to visualize and export reports.<\/td><\/tr>
Infegy<\/td>Advanced social media listening tool led by text analytics and natural language processing (NLP). It provides multiple ways to analyze text data, sentiment, emotions, volume, reach, and engagement.<\/td><\/tr>
Netbase<\/td>Enterprise-level social media monitoring tool. Provides insights from content posted on all digital channels. Offers advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine, image monitoring, trend tracking, influencer engagement, and real-time insights.<\/td><\/tr>
Zignal<\/td>Detects and assesses topics and narratives. Known for helping brand managers and PR pros navigate crises on social media and within media coverage.<\/td><\/tr>
Linkfluence<\/td>Provides industry and brand insights. Mines data from across the web to capture real-time social media and forums conversations. Provides advanced analytics and social media listening tools like sentiment analysis<\/a>, trend discovery, and audience profiling.<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Brief Background of the Social Monitoring Landscape<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The social media monitoring landscape has always been crowded. While the market continues to mature and innovate, tracking who comes, who goes, which social listening tools merge, and which ones get acquired is challenging. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Suppose you are in the market to invest in social media monitoring software. In that case, I have started curating a list of the leading social monitoring tools I have used in the past, which may help with your purchase decision. Likewise, if you are interested in PR and media software, I’ve provided a similar analysis of the media monitoring<\/a> tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

History of Social Media Monitoring Companies<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In the beginning, there was the World Wide Web. Eventually, this became the Internet. And the Internet soon transformed into something more two-way and dynamic, becoming social media. The democratization of publishing content online followed, which created an open and public dialogue that consumers had about every product, service, and topic you could think of. Brands needed to start paying attention<\/a> because many social media conversations involved their products, services, and executives. So, over the years, monitoring social media for brand mentions and real-time audience insights became a marketing strategy<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few social media monitoring companies dominated the space in the early days. Larger software companies have acquired all of them:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vendor<\/th>Acquired by<\/th>Acquisition Details<\/th><\/tr><\/thead>
Radian 6<\/td>Salesforce<\/td>Salesforce acquired Radian6 in 2011 for approximately $326 million in cash and $50 million in stock. Radian6’s technology is now part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.<\/td><\/tr>
Sysomos<\/td>Meltwater<\/td>Sysomos was acquired by Meltwater in April 2018. The CEO of Sysomos, Peter Heffring, said the company would continue to operate as an independent unit of Meltwater. Heffring would run the social analytics division of Meltwater.<\/td><\/tr>
Collective Intellect<\/td>Oracle<\/td>Oracle acquired Collective Intellect in June 2012. The acquisition was intended to add real-time social monitoring, analytics, and insights to Oracle’s social platform. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed.<\/td><\/tr>
Visible Technologies<\/td>Cision<\/td>Visible Technologies was sold to Vocus and Cision, a newly-merged company that makes software for the public relations field. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.<\/td><\/tr>
Cymfony<\/td>Visible Technologies<\/td>Cymfony was merged with Visible Technologies in 2012. The specific financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.<\/td><\/tr>
Scout Labs<\/td>Lithium Technologies<\/td>Visible Technologies was sold to Vocus and Cision, a newly merged company that makes software for the public relations field. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Radian 6 and Sysomos were the best social media tracking tools then. While these early social media monitoring companies have paved the way for new product innovation, there are new vendors today that have differentiated functionality and pricing options. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is Social Media Monitoring?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Social media monitoring is the marketing practice of using software to track conversations and mentions on social media. Other use cases include measuring share of voice, social analytics, reporting & measurement, and managing social customer care. Most social media listening software tools track brand mentions across all platforms, news sites, reviews, and blogs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few platforms provide advanced analytics, NLP, and text analysis, taking social listening to the next level. It goes beyond measure in numbers and provides the context of social media conversations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Does Social Listening Software Work?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

All social listening platforms work the same way. You start with identifying the most relevant keywords to your products, services, and business. This includes brand-specific keywords as well as topical or industry-related keywords. Once you’ve identified the right keywords, you add them to the social media listening platform using a form of Boolean Logic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You then have to decide which channels you want to monitor and from which channels. This will include news, review sites, blogs, and social media channels. Other than LinkedIn and Facebook, the platforms supported include most other social networks. More advanced social monitoring platforms provide audience research and the ability to listen to social media mentions over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The social monitoring tool collects mentions from each source and then displays them using various data visualizations. You can then use the data and look for actionable business insights<\/a>. Based on my research, it’s clear that some social media monitoring tools prioritize data visualization and data mining over others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most social listening features include access to historical data from various online sources dating back 10+ years, allowing you to track industry trends or consumer conversations over an extended period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also, sentiment analysis is a common feature among social media monitoring tools. Sentiment analysis is about 60% to 65% accurate without human layer analysis. If you are not cross-referencing sentiment analysis and manually coding data samples, you might get sentiment analysis completely wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most social media scanning tools don’t advertise that they have free trials. However, if you are an active buyer and have gone through a series of demos but are still unsure, most platforms will honor free trials with limited access to data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regarding advanced reporting capabilities, only a few social media monitoring platforms have distanced themselves from the rest of the pack. For example, Digimind provides advanced API access and directly integrates with Google Data Studio. This is where most social platforms can innovate and provide better access to advanced reporting capabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Advanced Use Cases of Social Media Monitoring<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

My favorite social media monitoring use cases are real-time audience listening and customer engagement. This involves building specific audiences important to your business, listening to what they publish online, and sharing and talking about it in real time. It’s also using the data to create content relevant to those conversations. This approach will foster brand advocacy and support a data-driven customer engagement strategy<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another use case of social media monitoring is listening to customer feedback, consolidating insights, and taking action. For example, customer feedback might show that your audience is asking for a particular color of sneakers or a new feature added to your software. Taking action means implementing that customer feedback into your product roadmap. This drives product innovation, and it can also create brand ambassadors<\/a> at the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I use two additional use cases with social media monitoring tools that I probably talk about too much\u2014 audience analysis and media intelligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using the features and functionality of social media listening, it’s not difficult to analyze audiences to understand better who they are and what they care about. From a B2B standpoint, imagine tracking IT decision-makers<\/a> and their conversations on social media throughout their buyer journey. It’s possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can do the same with various consumer audiences like Gen Z. We all know they are very vocal online and are not shy about telling the world what they like and dislike when buying products. So imagine tracking Gen Z’s shopping habits<\/a>\u00a0for different products and services. It’s possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also prefer to use social media monitoring tools to analyze specific headlines and long-form coverage in the media by using text analysis. This approach can uncover hidden narratives the media is writing about and make your narrative more relevant when pitching to reporters. This type of analysis is critical to any PR strategy<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Building an Integrated Social Media Listening Strategy<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Most people equate social media monitoring with just social media marketing. For years, social media as a marketing practice was just an add-on to someone’s responsibilities. This person could have worked in public relations, marketing, or customer support. It wasn’t until about seven or eight years ago that CMOs and marketing leaders began to create teams specifically for social media. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These teams comprised social media managers<\/a>, creative designers, analysts, copywriters, and paid media strategists. Since the social media job function has become a much more strategic force supporting almost all businesses, it has achieved its independence as a stand-alone team and role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

All that to say, social media monitoring is much more than just a tool for community managers<\/a>. Analyzing online conversations can provide consumer insights about products, features, competitors, etc. However, it’s up to marketing and public relations teams to mine these conversations and extract relevant insights for their business. Integrating social listening tools with other relevant data like web analytics, social media analytics, and primary research becomes even more strategic and business-critical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As mentioned above, insights extracted from social media monitoring can inform marketing, PR, customer support, sales, and product innovation. It can also provide supplemental data for market research teams and be a core representative data set to monitor brand health<\/a> online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Differences Between Social Listening and Social Monitoring<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This is more about semantics, but social listening and monitoring mean the same thing. The definition of monitoring is to “observe and check the progress or quality of (something) over a date range.” In this case, “something” refers to social media and the conversations happening online and on various digital channels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, social media monitoring software is another category for your martech stack<\/a>. While they do have social media monitoring capabilities, the core value proposition of this type of software is more about publishing, scale, and governance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is more than just social listening if you think about the roles and responsibilities of social media marketing as a job function. You must consider publishing posts, customer engagement, password management, integrated analytics, and social care. Unfortunately, the social media monitoring platforms listed<\/a> below don’t offer all these other capabilities. Two software media monitoring companies that provide this are considered leaders in space, Sprinklr and Khoros (formerly Spredfast).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Analyst’s Perspective: Social Media Monitoring Tools<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Sadly, large analyst firms like Forrester and Gartner don’t prioritize the social media monitoring industry. There have been reports in the past, but they’re not as frequent or comprehensive as they should be. This is one reason you should look beyond the analyst reports when investing in social media monitoring tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Forrester Wave Report in 2020 did highlight the top social listening platforms<\/a>. Unfortunately, not all vendors made it into the report, but they all have features and functionality worthy of enterprise deployment and consideration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Below is the Forrester Social Wave report and the G2 Grid for Social Analytics<\/a>. For reference, the G2 Grid is peer-reviewed and has similar data points to Forrester, specifically around the market presence of social media monitoring companies.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Forrester<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Mostly, there is little differentiation between the social media monitoring tools in the market today. However, the functionality differences, scalability, and cost might attract different buyers to these social monitoring platforms based on business and technical requirements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Top Social Media Monitoring Tools & Software Platforms<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Below is a curated social media monitoring software comparison of tools. As technology and innovation advance, some of these features and functionality will continue to adapt and evolve. I will do my best to update this information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All Ears Social Listening Software (Audio & Video)<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

All Ears<\/a> is a social listening platform that monitors and analyzes audio and video content, focusing on platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Podcasts. It uses AI to transcribe, detect, and analyze brand or topic mentions within these media formats. This tool fills the gap many enterprise social platforms don’t address.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Critical features of All Ears include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n