Doing social media marketing is one thing, but if you’re not analysing what you’re doing, you may as well be doing nothing at all. Dave Howell compares four of the current market-leading social analytics platforms
With masses of data now being collected across the B2B landscape from the ever-expanding number of social media networks, turning this raw data into meaningful and actionable insight is now vital. According to AdAge, 80 per cent of B2B marketers will expand their digital marketing spend this year, making accurate analytics even more critical.
As social media channels have expanded, so have the tools that have become available to help businesses understand how their customers are using these networks.
The analytical platforms that are now available offer a level of insight and customer profiling that has not previously been possible. Also, the granular detail that can be obtained about individuals and their enterprises is unprecedented.
To understand the current state of social media analytics, we have put four of the leading platforms head-to-head to assess their current features. This group test also illustrates what analytical services can help B2B marketers better understand their customers, and how these systems can make sense of the masses of data that all B2B organisations are now collecting from their social media networks. We tested for features, implementation, versatility, usability and value for money.
Social media analytics platform analysis
Developer: HubSpot
Solution: Social Inbox
Price: Pricing ranges by product features and contact tiers
The sophistication when Social Inbox is taken in context with the wider features that HubSpot has on offer has prompted some reviewers to ask whether an additional CRM such as Salesforce is actually needed. HubSpot is able to share information with Salesforce and visa versa, but as social media analytics have become more important, focusing on the social aspects could mean that platforms like Salesforce become less vital.
HubSpot is however – at the moment at least – focused on the small business sector, which may mean B2B customers will see few enterprise level features that would allow them to abandon their existing CRM platforms, or would mean the links to their existing Salesforce implementation remain important to maintain. The decision at the moment is whether your organisation is able to manage with ‘light’ CRM or needs detailed contact information with social media tracking and analysis being of a secondary concern. An existing Salesforce installation augmented with Social Inbox is a powerful combination.
We liked the way all the activity can be categorised and seen as a summary, which is great when you want to see how well – or not – a piece of marketing has performed. Also, when a new potential client makes contact and is unknown by the system, Social Inbox can look at the CRM (the HubSpot contacts database) and see if there is anyone similar. Locating customer details is vital, but we didn’t see a way of filtering out new contacts unknown to your business from the general list of people that had responded to a piece of inbound marketing.
Existing HubSpot users will relish the new intelligence that Social Inbox brings to their customer insights. The colour-coded social post is a powerful way to identify where in the sales funnel a particular contact is. Many of the analytical platforms that are available use a brute force approach with keyword searches at the heart of their data. With alert triggers for marketers available including the tracking of competitor mentions, HubSpot users now have a tool that places a more personal and social layer onto their contact databases, but also enables more detailed insights into how contacts are behaving and reacting to any given piece of marketing collateral.
Best for: Existing HubSpot users wanting to drill into their existing contact database and expand their use of social as a contact channel.
Developer: Sprout Social
Solution: Sprout Social
Price: From $39 per user per month (standard package). Free trial available
One of the most striking aspects of Sprout Social is its well-designed dashboard that gives a complete snapshot of the activity under analysis. Unlike HootSuite, for instance, users can see influence and engagement metrics, which form the basis of all good analytical systems. Sprout Social is also able to layer onto the data it has available a number of additional metrics such as location.
The reporting that is available from Sprout Social is excellent and feeds nicely into their highly user friendly interface. With many analytical systems, users can feel overwhelmed by the masses of data that is presented. From an analytical point of view, filters are more important so B2B marketers can make sense of the data they are seeing, relate this to campaigns they are running, and of course track new and existing sales leads.
Sprout Social offers the ability to track competitor mentions. We also liked the ability to design a custom inbox that will only deliver the data and insights you need to focus on a particular goal. The messages tab, for instance, aggregates recent messages and their comments, allowing interactions to be tracked.
One of the most powerful aspects of social media analysis is the ability to compare several networks side-by-side to develop a clear view of which marketing campaigns are delivering the highest conversions from which social media networks. These types of comparison aren’t handled easily within Sprout Social. You can export the information to a spreadsheet and make the comparison there, but we would have liked to see a more elegant solution. And at the moment, only the leading social media networks are tracked. B2B enterprises need to also see how other networks such as Instagram and Pinterest are connecting with their businesses.
However, Sprout Social does a great job of delivering information that can form the basis of ROI tracking. Group statistics, Twitter stats and engagement reports are all available, which can be exported as CSV files or PDFs.
If your business is looking for an analytical application that will show the activity your enterprise has received across all of the major social media networks, Sprout Social can deliver this with ease. We particularly liked the task assignment feature that offers businesses with multiple departments to assign tasks to individuals.
Best for: Integrating social activity. reporting with an existing CRM system.
Developer: HootSuite
Solution: HootSuite Enterprise
Price: Free, Pro from $8.99/month and Enterprise starting at $1000/month
Until now, HootSuite has concentrated on what it does well – the ability to track and monitor social media interactions. However, with the acquisition of Ubervu, HootSuite now has a highly capable analytics platform that dovetails into the main application to deliver detailed reporting all B2B marketers have been waiting for. The enterprise level analytical capability Ubervu includes, makes HootSuite an instant contender for enterprise-level analytics.
What we found particularly powerful with HootSuite Enterprise is its ability to look at data at a highly granular level. Keyword searches offer insight, but it’s when the returned data is drilled down into that, the real power of the platforms is revealed for enterprise users. Competitor tracking, geographical data and a conversation map that gives a graphical view of conversations and their content, is highly useful when analysing a particular dataset.
Social media has meant that simply tracking clicks is no longer adequate to gain a 360-degree view of a customer and their behaviour. Sentiment has a major impact on business advocacy, which makes the detailed reporting of sentiment in five languages a welcome feature here, which we believe many B2B organisations will find very useful. It is also possible to tag a piece of content that could be related to a product or service that can then have a report run against these tags to deliver intelligence. Mentions with all their associated data can then be exported and used to support ROI or even KPIs that a business might have linked to its marketing activity.
Until now HootSuite was somewhat lacking in its ability to understand and then perform meaningful analysis on the vast amounts of data it is able to collect. With Ubervu, layering of data to make reporting much richer is now possible. Competitor analysis here is unique in this way. HootSuite Enterprise is certainly a major investment to make, but what B2B organisations will see is that the analytics on offer provide an insight into every aspect of their organisation’s marketing activity in unprecedented detail.
Best for:Moving from monitoring social media activity, to analysing its impact in minute detail.
Developer: Simply Measured
Solution: Simply Measured Professional
Price: $800/month (free trial available)
Despite being a relative newcomer, Simply Measured has rapidly developed its reputation for highly detailed reporting. For all marketers, understanding which pieces of marketing collateral were interacted with is a start, but a more detailed insight into the customer journey, and how their marketing activity compares to their competitors is important to understand. In addition, the partnership with Klout also delivers influence metrics, which can be important when identifying qualified leads by their profiles and activity across the main social media networks.
Reporting is at the heart of Simply Measured. It offers 30 unique insights, including multiple channel reports for Twitter and Facebook. Its competitive reports and the complete social snapshot report is highly useful for taking broad views of how your organisation is performing across key social media networks. The approach to building the reports in Excel makes them ultimately exportable and offers a flexibility that many of the other platforms can’t match.
The reporting overview is presented as a dashboard. The Twitter account report, for instance, shows new followers, mentions and retweets to name just a few, with key indicators of engagement and influence being of the most interest for B2B marketers that need to make sense of the traffic across the social space that is surrounding their activity. We particularly liked the ability to filter this information to gain even more focused data.
For larger B2B organisations that have multiple Twitter accounts to keep track of and perform analysis across, Simply Measured is excellent in this respect. Add into this the ability to add analysis of competitor activity across the same networks; the report becomes a highly useful tool.
There is no doubt that the depth of data that the reports Simply Measured offer is detailed and comprehensive. The clean interface and the comprehensive reporting deliver confidence that the data these are based upon is timely and accurate. If your business is looking to focus on competitor tracking across all social media networks, Simply Measured is the platform to use.
Best for: Tracking competitors across the social space.
