6 social media monitoring tools are put to the test

Just under nine months ago, I ventured on a seemingly never-ending quest to find the Holy Grail of all social media monitoring (SMM) tools. Over the past few months, I have been carrying out detailed tests and analysis on six of the leading SMM tools. I’m delighted to report my quest is finally over and I now present you my thoughts and findings on all the tools I took for a test drive.

NetVibes
I found NetVibes worked more as a business intelligence dashboard vs. a social insight tool (which is what we wanted as an agency). This being the case, this tool was immediately dropped from our consideration list.

Overall rating: a limp 3/10

Meltwater Buzz
Meltwater has a simple interface and clean design which makes for easy navigation of your data. They also have a great ‘influencer’ module, so if your social strategy includes influencer outreach, Meltwater is a great tool to implement. The main downside was that sentiment is automated and cannot be edited. This meant that the data pulled back wasn’t that accurate and (sometimes) quite limited from an insight point of view.

Overall rating: an okayish 6/10

Radian6
First up, Radian6 is best for agencies if you’re trying to do community management. That aside, we were impressed by the tool’s flexibility: it’s possible to freely configure dashboards through a selection of widgets – which all have built-in filters and drill-down features, encouraging ad-hoc explorative analysis (big plus).

However, from a setup and insight perspective, Radian6 took me longer than other programs. The fact that every widget must be individually configured with keywords increases the manual workload and, by default, you can only access 30 days of historical data (then you start incurring extra costs).

Like Meltwater Buzz, Radian6’s sentiment analysis is automatic, but then again you’re able to override this, unlike Meltwater – but it’s still rather manual and time consuming.

Overall rating: an underperforming 5/10

Sysymos
Sysymos offer 2 products: Heartbeat and MAP. Heartbeat is designed for day-to-day monitoring and measurement requirements, while MAP provides an in-depth research tool, so we were more interested in MAP. Pros: it’s very user-friendly dashboard allows easy on-the-fly customisation; plus its ability to filter and segment data in a variety of different ways. Cons: Again, like Radian6 and Meltwater, Sysomos comes with automated sentiment analysis, and as you might have gathered from this post, I am a long-time cynic when it comes to this kind of feature.

Overall rating: an alright 6/10

Brandwatch
BrandWatch unifies several advantages of Sysomos and Radian6. It is as easy to use as Sysomos and delivers the best user interface of all tools reviewed, with flexible well-laid-out dashboards that you can easily piece together through a drag ’n’ drop system. The interface is great for comparing data sets (such as competitor sentiment) and has the best query writing features I’ve seen in any product on the market. They also allow unlimited users for the same yearly cost, which was a massive USP. The support team were also very helpful and most issues or questions are resolved almost the same day.

Overall rating: an impressive 8/10

Crimson Hexagon
Crimson unifies several advantages of Sysomos, BrandWatch and Radian such as theme, sentiment, demographic and influence analysis. But the key thing which differentiates this tool over all the others we tested was its ability to delve deeply into the voice of the customer and its increased accuracy.

Without getting to technical, Crimson is able to refine their results based on their context and content. In other words, semantic technology is able to understand the difference between “Crocs” the shoes or “crocs” the reptile – so you get much less irrelevant “noise”. This also means that the posts pulled in are 97% accurate vs. 70% of traditional keyword tools (note: most of the above tools are keyword based SMM tools).

Another great thing about Crimson is that you can go beyond traditional sentiment analysis − which measures whether a post is generally positive, or generally negative. Instead, you’re able to breakdown this sentiment into more refined categories and understand exactly what people think about a brand.

For example, when looking at why people love about a certain car, we could break down the positive sentiment into ‘reliability,’ ‘design/style,’ ‘safety’ and ‘tech’, which gave us a lot deeper, more accurate insights than keyword sentiment tools which basically just tells you the weighting of positive comments vs. negative or neutral.

Overall rating: a spectacular 9/10

Final verdict
All systems have strong qualities and when it comes to choosing your social media monitoring system, you will need to look specifically at your own needs. We decided to go with Crimson Hexagon for its deep data and in-depth tools that allow us to identify the granular data that our clients need. Do let us know what you think. After all, it’s a social world!

By DMA guest blogger Becky Heard, Integrated Planner, Indicia

This is an edited version of a blog that first appeared on the Indicia website