Social Media Monitoring Tools – an Incomplete Digest

While social media is more and more hyped up and everybody is jumping on the social media bandwagon, businesses ask what is in it for our shop? What’s the actual effect, what’s the ROI? In comes social media monitoring. What should we track, really, and what are appropriate tools? Read this incomplete digest… And of course I’m wondering which of the mentioned providers will be first to react to this post ;-) Update: And the winner is… Engagor! It took them just two minutes to retweet and also comment. Well done! That’s what social media monitoring does, I guess… First I thought I would have removed the competitor brands had I retweeted in their place. But then again it’s nice to show them who is the quickest kid in town …

Social Media Monitoring: What to Measure?

This is a tough one, of course… Often times social media initiatives are started as a small venture in order to test the water. There may be no overall strategy and budget since starting costs are close to zero. Since social media is about branding and customer interaction, direct sales may not always be involved. That makes it hard to come up with a ROI calculation. Besides, involved company resources are usually already paid via an existing service budget. Allocating those costs properly is usually not easy. If those existing resources can be used for social media at all… 5 interesting social media metrics (according to Heidi Cohen): Reach: Measure who interacted with your company based on social media campaigns. Don’t give too much on the number of followers, e.g. on Twitter. Many of those will be automated robots that won’t buy from you! Branding: Social media can seriously impact a brand, on the positive as well as on the negative side. Dell Computers and many others have made their shitstorm experiences (Jeff Jarvis to Michael Dell, report of the case on Bloomberg Businessweek). Action: Define reasonable calls to action that you measure. These may not necessarily include sales but also downloads, comments, likes, +1, etc. Those little ’statements› are shared throughout a user’s network and may influence or hint others to your product or service. Costs: Many social media networks come at hardly any costs. Except from your staff’s time and training, of course. If they are allocated to other business units than social media you should still factor in their resources. Properly setting up and maintaining several social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, GooglePlus, Blogs, etc. can be extremely time consuming! But in our business environment we won’t get away with ‹well, I need a budget, but I don’t know the ROI…› Yongfook from Egg Co. suggests the following social media metrics. Examples among others include Dell ;-)
 

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Besides the usual criteria like user friendliness, accessibility, etc. there’s the more specific topics. According to Ani Dave from social-eyez.com there are three simple questions to ask at the beginning:

1. Is the tool capable to monitor my entire audience?
2. Does the tool assist me translate numbers into an actionable strategy?
3. How relevant are the results to my overall goals and objectives?

@TheSocialMined has numerous further links on the topic. http://twitter.com/#!/TheSocialMined/status/91215562880987136

oneforty offers descriptions and ratings of the low cost tools Beevolve, eCairn Conversation, PostRank (now acquired by Google), UberVu and ViralHeat. Free Chrome plugins for simple social monitoring: GetClicky web analytics and TwitterWatch: Jay Baer shows how to create a share of voice report with Social Mention, a free web site that monitors and organises social media chatter. And here he lists relevant social media tools sorted by criteria such as Twitter & Facebook, virality & search, photos, tracking, content creation, listening, email and iPhone. As per usual SEOmoz has a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of social media tracking tools and APIs. Klout is a good place to start measuring your and your competitor’s online reputation. Read the San Francisco Chronicle on Klout putting numbers on online influence. Digital Visitor compared Radian6, Alterian’s SM2 and Meltwater Buzz. Endless list in a Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions… SimplyZesty on free social media monitoring tools. And if you’re not yet quite sure whether you really need to get up to speed, check out these 65 Social Media Infographics. Scary stuff!

Further reading

A Swiss digest on social media monitoring tools that target European peculiarities is available in German from Goldbach Interactive. It describes the two leading systems Sysomos Heartbeat and Radian6 as well as others such as BrandWatch or Engagor.com. Potentially also promising (at least it has an awesome name): awe.sm oneforty compiled an incredible list with hundreds (!) of monitoring tools. Had I only not started to tap into this ;-) Another comprehensive list is available from Webgranth, a knowledge base for web designers and developers. http://twitter.com/#!/WalterSchaerer/status/91619748680437761

  Update 15.9.2011: Engagor.com is impressive indeed! They noticed and said ‹thank you› yet again when I mentioned them in a comment on SEOmoz.org. How cool a monitoring is that!