Although social media has become ubiquitous in the life of many technophiles, for many the whole idea of social media is simply, well, social. Sharing comments, photos, and personal news, for example, is considered by many the primary function of social media.
Less well-understood is how enterprises can use social media as part of a marketing strategy for their company and brands. There are at least 100 software products, some of which are freeware, that either run in a browser or are available on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis. These tools can help your enterprise identify boosters of your product, as well as complaints or detractors, so that the originators of those comments can be contacted, supported, or refuted by members of your staff. They can also help your enterprise develop and manage new marketing strategies based on social media.
Social Media as a Marketing Tool
In a nutshell, social media monitoring tools search social media sites for references to your business or products. These sites can include such well-known Web destinations as Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter, as well as varying numbers of forums, blogs, and commercial news sites. Some tools also scan video sites like Google Video, Grouper, DailyMotion, YouTube, and others.
Then, those references can be compiled and shared with designated users at your company. Depending on the capabilities of each product, those brand or company mentions can be made the subject of e-mail alerts, analyzed in various ways, loaded into standard reports or dashboards, placed into searchable databases, or various combinations of any of these functions, for use as strategic information. Most also offer automatic translations into English from various national languages, although a few still handle only English tweets.
Many products also offer, for example, workflow features that let information gleaned from these many sources be directed to one or many individuals, teams, or groups for further analysis and action. "Action" may include direct responses from the company, providing links to product information that may refute or clarify customer misconceptions, and individualized responses to specific posters.
Different Strategies for Different-Sized Companies
The first concept to understand about social media for business is that strategies for its use can be different, depending on whether you're a large or small company.
"In large organizations, there are layers of approval and people who are afraid of saying the wrong things on social media. People have always been afraid, but never has it been this easy to make mistakes," comments Ricky Yean, CEO of Crowdbooster. "The flip-side for that is that small businesses are able to share more intimate, personal, and interesting things on social media because fewer organizational barriers are in the way. I would encourage SMBs to take advantage of that fact and be as personal as possible to outshine large organizations' contrived and irrelevant posts on social media."
"Larger companies often have much more data to sift through, consume, manage, and interact with—and more internal compliance, regulations, and teams to collaborate with to ensure alignment and cohesiveness across social media programs," notes Eve Sangenito, vice-president of marketing at Brandwatch. "Smaller companies often have the benefit of agility on their side, if they prepare themselves to take advantage of that flexibility in the way they establish social media guidelines, creative programs, analysis, and engagement. But across both, depending on the organization, challenges can still exist in resource staffing, budget, executive support, etc."
"Social media has actually leveled the marketing playing field, and in some ways smaller businesses now have an advantage," agrees Andrew Caravella, vice president of marketing at SproutSocial. "They don't have to break through the same cumbersome processes and hierarchy that large companies have. Instead, they can build a nimble team that can swiftly and authentically engage with customers."
"People in smaller companies typically have to be a bit scrappier on any marketing initiative, given budgets and headcount," observes Leslie Nuccio, senior content marketing strategist, social media, at Meltwater. "The good news is that social media is a constantly evolving discipline, so there's a lot of room for experimentation. In smaller companies, that can give the social media manager more freedom than with an established brand wherein process and brand concerns can sometimes hamper experimentation. Also, social listening can inform business efforts across the organization, so that sort of effort is one that a smaller company might centralize with the social media manager in order to maximize resources."
Getting Started with Social Media for Business
Social media monitoring tools can be divided into two broad categories: freeware, which of course is free, and pay-to-play tools that require you to pay a licensing or service fee to use the product at all or to access advanced features.
In general, if you just want to dip a toe in the social-media waters before making a financial commitment, start with one or two of the freeware products. This will give you some idea of how monitoring products work and will also give you some information on your brand or company's visibility in social media almost instantly. If on the basis of that, you see the value of having more information than the freeware products provide, then explore the various paid software tools.
When asked for their advice on how best to start using social media for business, the vendors stressed getting started even in small ways and listening carefully.
"Listening to the activity of your social community is the single best way to build an authentic, engaged social audience," Sprout Social's Caravella advises. "Save some time by setting up listening operators in your social media management tool and use what you find to connect with influencers and begin developing a relationship with them." (Listening operators are employees designated to track enterprise social-media mentions, and influencers are people who are vociferous in their use of social media to compliment (or blast) your company or your brand.)
"Pick your most comfortable one social media channel (e.g., Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook) and start sharing. Don't worry when others tell you that you have to be on this channel and that channel, too," Crowdbooster's Yean counsels. "Just get started and develop a habit of sharing about what your business does and what would be helpful or entertaining to your customers online."
"When just starting out, it's always key to have an initial business goal in mind, and particularly one that's focused on solving a pain point," Brandwatch's Sangenito recommends. "Are you focused on assessing and improving your brand reputation? Are you aiming to gain market research or intelligence? Or is managing and responding to customer service inquiries more of a challenge? Depending on your business, the answer and your approach may differ. So identifying where you can move the bar the most is critical. In doing so, you should also then determine the best steps to get there and how you're going to measure the results of your strategy or program. Determine early on which indicators or metrics are most relevant to determining if your campaign has been successful. Lastly, start simple and be prepared as you take on additional endeavors."
"First, make sure that yoursocial media marketing campaignis servicing a larger business goal (e.g., customer acquisition)," Meltwater's Nuccio offers. "Once you know what you're trying to do,social listeningis the first step—much as it behooves us, in personal interactions, to listen before we speak. Social listening is also is a great way to inform any business effort that would be assisted by input from a relevant social community. You don't necessarily need to be running a 'social media marketing' campaign in order to use social media monitoring toward a viable business end."
Additional sources of good information are blogs offered by many of the monitoring-tool vendors on their Web sites. These blogs and other docs are accessible for free and can provide useful insights into best uses of social media for business.
Social Media Monitoring Tools: The Products, Part I
As mentioned above, social media monitoring tools can be divided roughly into two categories. First are social media monitoring tools for which a license is required. Nearly all of these products are currently available on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis and run in a browser. Second are social media freeware products which, although they offer far fewer features, are ideal for enterprises just getting started with social media for business uses, or small businesses with limited budgets.
Because there are so many products, Part I of this article will list most of the paid software products. In Part II next month, we'll cover the rest of the licensed products and all of the freeware products, and we'll provide more vendor insights on questions of currying favor with influencers (once you've identified them) and expectations of future new product features in social media monitoring tools.
Some term definitions may help you make better sense of the product descriptions:
- Followers are people who pay attention to social-media posts of particular writers who are active in the social-media sphere.
- A pin is a virtual bookmark made by a social-media writer to alert their followers to a link or other online reference the writer thinks will be of interest.
- Psychographics is the study of the varying motivational factors that lead people of differing mindsets to take similar actions (e.g., buying your product).
- Sentiment refers to whether or not the majority of comments made on social media about your company or brand could be judged as positive or negative.
- Volume is the sheer number of times (also called buzz) your brand or company is referred to on social media in a given time period.
- Workflow refers to tools in software that facilitate sharing of information, particularly the passing along of information to different people in a particular order.
Descriptions accompanying the product links below simply summarize a few important features of each product. Be sure to use the links to explore vendor Web sites for more complete product information.
Social Media Monitoring Tools for Business
Actionly is a social-media monitoring platform that also offers social-media marketing tools. The product monitors keywords across blogs, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, and other channels and consolidates what users are saying about an enterprise in a single dashboard-style reporting interface.
Argus der Presse AG
ARGUS Avenue provides a single platform for viewing brand and company mentions in digital and traditional media, including social networks, blogs, news Web sites, radio, TV, and print media. Features include dashboard presentation of results, inclusion of sources in major European languages, and analysis of presence, reputation, benchmarking, and other issues.
B2B Social Marketing helps users coordinate social media with other marketing campaigns by combining social media input with regular sales and marketing data into a single business intelligence app. Users can automate and synchronize marketing efforts, authenticate social media value to the enterprise, and analyze the relationship of social media to new business.
Attensity Analyze bills itself as a customer analytics application that not only monitors social-media and other online sources, but also scans customer relationship management app data, incoming e-mails, and call center records. It helps users identify problems, profile customer behavior, and zero in on key relationships.
Blitzmetrics runs on any device, including mobile phones, and provides social-media dashboards for one or more brands. It keeps an eye on brand mentions across all major social media networks, generates custom reports, and tracks content performance, newsfeed coverage, and feedback rates.
Bottlenose Pro is a more advanced version of Bottlenose for business that is currently seeking beta users. Bottlenose Pro adds features such as real-time trend detection, live social metrics, historical social analytics, custom reports and reusable widgets, and insights on geography and psychographics.
Brandwatch keeps an eye on social media for mentions of a particular product or company. Features include customizable dashboards, the ability to separate and segment large datasets, automatic displays of key trends and themes about specific queries, rules and data filters, customizable e-mail alerts, statistics compilation and charting, and personal account managers for enterprise customers.
Brand Monitor scans the social media landscape for product mentions and presents data about them in graphical trend charts presented in a dashboard format that can be exported or e-mailed. Users can optionally add scanning of radio and TV broadcasts.
BuzzEquity Pro offers trending for monitored terms, multiple daily updating, social network and forum monitoring, insights for charts and analytics, and automated sentiment analysis and scoring.
BuzzStream for PR and Social Media helps users identify major influencers on the Web, rate their influence, and add them to contact lists. The product features include bookmarking tools for Web sites and blog posts, automated contact information searching, influence metrics, and data importation from Web site analysis tools.
CARMA Connect is a service that analyzes both traditional and social media to analyze the total impact of a brand or company name and to help users formulate the most effective new media strategies. Analysis includes both marketing communications and public-affairs activities.
ForSight is a social-media analysis application that probes themes, opinions, and drivers of sentiment about specific brands on social networks. ForSight charts social sentiment using a data visualization and categorization model that helps identify the most prolific authors talking about relevant topics and themes.
Crowdbooster helps identify individuals in an enterprise audience, translates analysis metrics into graphical charts, makes active recommendations about who the enterprise should engage in dialogue and how to improve content and message timing, and lets users customize and schedule posts and tweets.
Curalate focuses on visual social media such as Instagram and Pinterest to provide analysis of brand awareness on those networks and help formulate strategies for improving brand images on the visual side of the Web.
CustomScoop is a monitoring solution that covers both traditional and social media to help enterprises understand public perceptions of their company and brands. CustomScoop tracks coverage from traditional news sources in 156 countries, monitors social conversations on all the major social networks, rates and organizes results, and presents results in standard or customized executive briefings and reports.
CyberAlert is a service that monitors broadcast news, online news, and social networks for mentions of brand or company names. Social-media monitoring includes blogs, forums, message boards, Usenet newsgroups, social videos, Twitter, and Facebook. It also provides tools for organizing and analyzing harvested data and gaining insights into corporate and brand reputation.
DataSift scans conversations on blogs, message boards, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit YouTube, and other sources for references to keywords, which are then placed in a database, against which users can run queries. Also available are demographics, filters, historics, and other features.
EdgeRank Checker Pro is a fee-based enhancement of the company's EdgeRank Checker (see freeware listings), which scans Facebook and scores the likelihood of a company or brand appearing in Facebook News Feeds. The Pro version adds a real-time monitor, page-specific industry reports, quality grading of posts, and other features.
Engagor provides a single tool that lets users manage all enterprise social-media activity, from monitoring to analytics to engagement. It tracks posts on all major social networks and millions of blog and news sites in more than 160 national languages and in every nation on the globe.
Social Engage provides one-on-one communication with Facebook and Twitter followers, provides a unified inbox for all social-media conversations, and enables creation and scheduling of publication for social-media content.
Fliptop is a customer intelligence platform that helps integrate social marketing with other marketing campaigns, identify leads and influential customers, and enrich contacts via social and scoring data. The product includes an API for integration with sales, marketing, and other applications.
Gorkana's Social Media Services include Gorkana Radar, a social-media monitoring and analysis tool that filters through millions of conversations to pinpoint product and company mentions; Social Media Buzz Alerts, which delivers information about brand mentions to designated user inboxes daily; and Social Media Measurement, which offers audits and reports that analyze current activities and social-media strategies.
HootSuite offers tools for managing multiple social networks, scheduling messages and tweets, tracking brand mentions, and analyzing social-media traffic.
HubSpot focuses on inbound marketing, the process of developing company Web site content that attracts people interested in what you're selling, and then converts them to customers after they've found you. Concepts include building content that answers basic questions, gradual personalization of messages, and integration of publishing and analytical tools.
Radarly is a social-media intelligence suite for monitoring, engagement, and analytics. It includes task-oriented pages for community managers and social-media analysts, key performance indicators for engagement/sentiment and other scoring, and summary dashboards for monitoring and taking action in real-time.
Lithium Social Web helps customer service departments respond to posts across social channels. It identifies and prioritizes posts before sending them to appropriate teams for direct responses on the social network of origin. Supervisory functions also let team leaders monitor response times and team activity metrics, as well as issue mass responses to similar service complaints or requests.
MarketMeSuite is aimed at small companies that want to look for customers on social media. The product locates social media participants who discuss topics related to a specific market, geographically locates them, helps the enterprise engage them, and provides executive summaries via e-mail.
MediaMiser is a suite of four products at varying prices that provide escalating social and traditional media scanning for topics, brands, terms, or company mentions. At the bottom, MediaMiser SNAP provides scans for up to 10 terms with results directed to a single user. At the top, MediaMiser Enterprise Plus offers unlimited search terms for five or more users and scans traditional and broadcast media as well as social media.
MediaVantage is a search engine that combines scans of traditional media coverage and social-media mentions into a single database for analysis, management, and strategic planning. It's designed to help with general public relations as well as specific media-message management.
Social Media Monitoring is a suite of products that help enterprises tap into social media conversations about themselves, gauge brand awareness by tracking the volume of social media comments, and better understand their target audiences. Meltwater News offers global media monitoring and analytics, Meltwater Buzz provides social media monitoring and social engagement, and Meltwater Press helps you build targeted media lists.
Mention works via browsers on PCs and mobile devices to monitor any keyword in real-time and receive filtered, organized, and prioritized results. It is deployable for in-house team communications and social-media monitoring, includes an API for integration with existing apps, and includes a statistics and data-export tool.
MutualMind takes a three-pronged approach to monitoring social media. It searches for specific terms and keywords on the Web, views comments on blogs and major social networks, and tracks comments from target audiences and influencers. It then analyzes the data for summary reports or dashboards, or for direct input to other software via APIs.
SMMS helps users form and execute a social-media business strategy. It includes features for publishing content to multiple social networks, monitoring the entire social Web or just company properties on those networks, analyzing campaigns and other statistics, and engaging with customers across multiple channels with audit trails for all activities.
Netvibes pitches to individuals (with a freeware version), agencies, and enterprises, tracking media mentions and displaying the results in customized dashboards. The agency version lets agencies provide the dashboard directly to their customers, and the enterprise version aims to replace portals as a way to share internal and external company data within single organizations.
NUVI is a service that gives enterprises access to social-media conversations in real-time. Customer support, public relations, sales, and product-development teams can view conversations as they happen and take remedial or supportive actions at once.
Oracle Social Relationship Management is a product suite for accessing and analyzing social media presence. The Oracle Social Engagement and Cloud Monitoring Service offers listening, engagement, and analysis capabilities across social networks to capture relevant brand conversations and help enterprises better understand their customers. The Oracle Social Marketing Cloud Service provides consolidated content and publishing management for company-originated content on social networks. Oracle WebCenter Social enables cross-team enterprise collaboration and enhances employee productivity with conversations, content annotation, and business-application integration tools.
PiQuant focuses on influencers on Facebook and Twitter. It helps individuals quantify their status as influencers and helps enterprises identify their top 150 influencers. PiQuant also provides reports that summarize 50 actionable insights that can help an enterprise improve its social-media community.
Buddy Media helps users publish integrated product campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and existing company Web sites. It helps create landing pages, analyze demographics and trends, and compile business metrics.
Radian6 scans the Web for conversations and messages containing references to your company and products and then lets you route important comments to appropriate internal departments for action. The company offers online access to dashboard-style analysis tools, how-to guides, FAQs, and video tutorials.
Social.com facilitates the building, optimization, and automation of advertising campaigns on Facebook and Twitter.
SDL SM2 (formerly Alterian SM2) lets users capture and analyze data from social media channels to help drive brand awareness campaigns, manage enterprise reputation, and identify and engage key influencers in particular markets. It features a data warehouse, customizable dashboards, multiple levels of sentiment analysis, and sets of category rules for filtering data.
Shoutlet is a social marketing and media-management platform designed for enterprises. It helps social-media teams respond to posts on major social networks, collaborate using workflow features, and design content with Shoutlet's Social Canvas tool, which requires no coding.
Simplify360 helps integrate social-media strategies with core business functions. It includes brand-monitoring functions that report what people are saying about products online, offers a social-media publishing infrastructure that tracks company postings and responses in a single dashboard, analyzes performance and influence ratings, and presents data and tools in a single console.
SocialBro focuses exclusively on Twitter to find references to the user's brand, company name, or other search terms. It browses the community, recommends best times to make outgoing tweets, generates statistical reports, analyzes competitor activities, benchmarks enterprise performance on Twitter compared to other companies, and provides a single-dashboard view of contacts.
SocialOomph is freeware (see freeware listings in Part II of this article) that manages enterprise access to the Twitterverse. SocialOomph Professional extends product features to Facebook, LinkedIn, and other networks, and adds e-mail tools, the ability to create social updates from RSS feeds, and other features.
Socialseek offers a unified interface that lets enterprises monitor their brand mentions, participate in social-media networks, launch and manage social-media campaigns, and analyze results.
SoDash uses patent-pending machine-learning algorithms to let users "teach" it to look for particular kinds of messages and, for example, tag them by their sentiment. The objective is to cut through the clutter of thousands or millions of messages to focus on the most important ones.
Spredfast is an enterprise social-media management system for observing and interacting with users of most major social networks. Its analyzes performance trends and channels, parses ongoing conversations to find the most productive ones to which to respond, coordinates enterprise social-media activity, and shares information with other apps and mobile-device users.
SproutSocial helps companies cope with incoming social media messages, scans for brand or company keywords in general social media, provides weekly summary reports of findings, monitors competitors, and keeps up with industry news. Analytical features let users sort company and brand mentions by social networks, quantify them, and export data to PDF, spreadsheet files, and report-style documents.