Following from my last post on the need to shift focus from simply using social media to analysing how you use social media and whether its working for you, I thought I'd summarise some of the top tools available, both for free and paid for services, and what size and nature of company these tools are best suited to.
Below are 5 major services, this is by no means an exhaustive list.
Hoot Suite – Multiple views and the tabbed layout makes navigation easy plus the general design is very user friendly. There are also options for auto tweeting and scheduling your tweets to post in the future. You can add accounts from your Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare profiles as well as Wordpress and MySpace. That’s a generous amount for a free service but it doesn’t have the reach for in-depth analytics.
Social Mention – The data returned is shallow but insight enough for a summary of your client's general social media engagement. The "Hot Conversations" feature is a nice touch, which displays topics that are trending. The reports are generated quite slowly but for a free tool it's very good overall and is well suited to brief social media audits used in a pitch rather than a detailed analysis.
Sprout Social – New kid on the block with a well designed dashboard that will be easy for novice users. This tool reports on your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, for the pricier package you also get the likes of FourSquare and Yelp added. There are affordable packages available from £9.99 - £49.99 per month making Sprout Social most suitable for freelancers, small agencies and start-ups. Bigger businesses and enterprises should probably consider the paid for services below.
Radian6 – In depth analytics, set up topics using keywords such as brand names, products, competitors etc. Radian6 monitors all social media platforms including blogs, forums, review sites, top video sharing and social networking sites, microblogging services and all online mainstream media channels. It delivers real-time data results and the cost for dashboard access is £75.00 per user/per month. This is a great tool for big social media campaigns where measurement and proof of ROI is key.
Sentiment Metrics – In depth analysis, similar to Radian6 it reports on all major social media sites; blogs, forums, social networks and news sites. The results tell you if the mentions are positive, negative or neutral. There are two pricing models - a single user account and a multi-user account. A single user account which covers you for 20 search terms is £800 per month. The multi-user licence starts at 50 search terms and 50 users – this service is only for those very serious about their social media reporting either from a client or agency perspective.
