Tracking your business’ exposure on the myriad of social networking services that are now available is vital to protect your brand. Dave Howell assesses four of the leading packages
Initial set-up is designed to be fast and intuitive. Once you have decided on the components of your topic profile, you can begin to use the dashboard and its widgets to drill down into the data and act on the information.
We liked the ability to create customised widgets, which could be useful for tracking highly focused information.
The trending widget shows volumes of mentions over time, with the influencer showing the top referral sources; both could be highly useful for organisations that have a narrow and highly specialised target audience. Media types can be instantly compared and contrasted.
We also liked the way this platform can estimate the number of returned items per month, providing a clear indication of the costs involved.
Radian6 is a comprehensive tool that enables your business to look closely at a discrete set of data. However, the quality of those returns will depend on how well defined you are able to make your topic profile.
If you are prepared to invest the energy in refining your topic profile, the accuracy of the returned results will be infinitely more precise.
Q. What exactly is social media tracking?
These new web-based services enable your business to track how your company is being described across all of the leading social media websites. Once set up, you can see how your business’ brand, product or service is being perceived on Twitter, Facebook and across many other blogs.
Q. Why is tracking social media important for my business?
The social networks that have developed over the last few years are increasingly taking centre stage in the B2B sector. It is vitally important that your business monitors its exposure across these sites to ensure brand integrity is maintained and any misleading comments are rebuffed as quickly as possible.
Q. Can I measure every aspect of my brand exposure on social media sites?
Using specialised algorithms, which are at the heart of these systems, comments made about your business can be assigned a score. This metric allows these tracking applications to make a judgement regarding the sentiments that are being associated with your company and its products or services. When the data is analysed, your business can see a snapshot of how it is being perceived at any time.
Q. Are there any problems with social media tracking applications I should be aware of?
Most of the current systems take metadata from a number of services. As each of the current social media tracking platforms uses different groups of social media metadata, your business must choose carefully to ensure that the results that you see on your reports are accurate. This is also important to reflect the true nature of your business’ exposure across the social media landscape.
Q. How accurate is the data social media tracking platforms can provide to my business?
The level of accuracy you can expect will depend on the collections of metadata that each service uses, but also the time your business spends refining how the data presented is categorised. Sentiment, for instance, can be subjective, but if your business spends the time refining the filters that can be applied to the raw data, accuracy can be vastly improved.
Features
The features of each of the packages were compared and contrasted together. This enabled us to gauge how each social media tracking package could be related to a B2B user.
Implementation
The way in which each social media tracking package could be installed and rolled out onto B2B enterprises systems was also evaluated. With a number of options available, each package’s implementation systems were compared.
Versatility
As no two businesses are the same, a social media tracking platform must be able to generate the reports to answer a specific business question. The way in which general reports could be customised and how sophisticated filtering was integrated into each package was also compared.
Usability
Social media tracking packages continue to develop at a rapid pace, meaning user interfaces and consoles have become complex systems in their own right. Each of the packages’ interfaces were tested for ease of use.
Value for money
Investing in a social media tracking service for your business can have a major financial impact on your enterprise. The cost of installation, maintenance and updates was assessed.
VERDICT
Sentiment is important in the B2B sector but focusing on the conversations that are taking place would be more insightful if your business is attempting to indentify trends for marketing purposes; or wants to use these tracking systems as an alternative (or in addition) to customer service research that can deliver the same indicators. Systems that take a plethora of data feeds can provide a sea of information to interrogate. The trick is to ask the right questions. The more focused your request, the more accurate the results. With detailed training and video tutorials built into the system, Radian6 is well rounded and thought through. Social Mention is the only free service in this group test, and can be used for quick insights, though it is an entry point solution that you will soon graduate from. SMR and Meltwater’s Buzz have a great deal of human intervention with the raw data that populates the systems. The user has to do very little with these platforms to reveal meaningful data about their company’s exposure. However, you can of course make your own tweaks to improve the results even further.
With a user interface that is reminiscent of Google Analytics, Social Media Reputation (SMR) is a complete analysis tool that is fast to set up, and returns powerful results.
The vast majority of the information that is contained on the dashboard is scored by using a wide range of criteria. Some of the metrics in place include reach (which measures how many, how influential and how widespread references to your brand) a sentiment score and a recency score.
Statistics can be viewed as mentions per day, posts by popularity and sentiment by demographics. The user interface enabled us to tailor our searches quickly and easily.
The ‘insight’ tab is an innovative feature that includes a top tip that your company can immediately act on based on current social media tracking. SMR sense checks (for sarcasm or slang) the data that it takes from its data supplier Alterian SM2 to ensure that only relevant information actually populates the SMR website. This is an valuable component that ensures confidence in the data being returned. Overall this is an excellent service that delivers its data in a clean interface. We also liked the detailed PDF report that can be generated to give your company a snapshot of its social media exposure in the past month.
Once you have set up search parameters, the initial screen delivers a snapshot to the dashboard of a two-week period. As a fast overview of your social media exposure, you get a clear sense of how your searches are being reflected across the landscape.
Meltwater places sentiment detection at the centre of its results with an excellent graphical representation of the search parameters. For companies in specialised industries, this can give a very accurate indication of the sentiment. We thought this feature was very powerful, easy to understand and ideal to use as a starting point for more detailed analysis.
The number of metadata suppliers that the system has at its foundation was impressive, as was its use of manual checking to improve the level of accuracy, particularly with the sentiment results.
The user interface of this platform is excellent. It enables you to easily change how your search results are presented to give a clear insight that your business can then act on it and it is more intuitive than other platforms. The ability to look closely at top influencers was particularly impressive. Overall, Meltwater’s Buzz is a well put together application that is fast to set up and delivers superb results.
This free service doesn’t offer anywhere near the features of paid-for competitors, but if you are looking for a fast snapshot of the social networks, it can deliver insightful results. These include a brute force aggregation of your keywords’ exposure across the social networks you have chosen, but your results are also analysed.
A scoring system is based on strength and passion. Sentiment and reach provide an indication of how your keywords are being used across the different social networks.
We liked the fast snapshot approach to Social Mention. Having all the data delivered to a single browser window in real-time made the system intuitive.
You can export your search results as CSV data for further analysis, but we would liked to have seen some form of online analytical tools, which would allow comparisons to be made between searches.
It is also possible to set-up a number of searches, with their results delivered to your inbox on a daily basis. There is also a plug-in widget that allows you to add Social Mention search to your browser’s toolbar.
This service is free so you can’t expect the bells and whistles of the other platforms in this group. As an entry-level product, however, it’s a great introduction to social media tracking.
