Social Media Monitoring—Choosing the Right Tool

Originally published on The New Group blog on 10.1.11

If you're a marketing strategy professional you know the importance of customer insights. Additionally, you know that you must incorporate the behavioral and conversational insights from the way business people and consumers are using social media today. With this an important question rapidly becomes: what's the best social media monitoring tool for my brand or business unit?

Well, it depends. Do you need to conduct historical analysis—and if so, over what time frame? Or do you need a tool that excels at real-time monitoring—if so, what social channels are most critical for your social media programs? Are you trying to identify and track your interactions with online influencers—and if so, do you need to coordinate the outreach efforts of multiple people or departments in your organization? Is closed-loop tracking of your outreach efforts a requirement or just a nice to have? These are not all, but certainly some, of the important questions you'll want to consider as you evaluate what the best-fit social media monitoring tool will be for your brand or business unit.

Over the past five plus years we've seen a plethora of social media monitoring tools enter the market. At The New Group we were early adopters and have used a number of tools including Social Radar, Radian6, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Buzz Logic (before it turned into a social advertising network), Scout Labs (before it was purchased by Lithium), Alterian SM2 and Sysomos. We've conducted our own research into more than 30 tools and generally take a deep look at the social media monitoring tool market about twice a year.

Currently our tool of choice is Sysomos. Far and away, our favorite feature is speed, and the user interface is pretty friendly too. Speed is crucial to our social media listening workflow. Social media isn't slowing down anytime soon, so tools that cannot return real-time results are quickly becoming obsolete. However, depending on your particular situation, a different tool might better serve your needs. There really is no perfect one-size-fits-all social media monitoring tool on the market today. If you start with that mindset then you'll be a happier camper with the tool you end up selecting in the end.