10 Social Media Monitoring Tools & Services That Are Worth A Closer Look
Many business employ social media marketing to reach their customers directly. With so many outlets, you need tools at your disposal which can monitor the effectiveness of your campaign across Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums and more. Here are ten social media monitors worth examining.
1. Radian6 ($600 per month)
Customize your searches with Radian6 and receive data from all over the web. The top-ranked company has a dashboard which lets you discreetly uncover the top opinions from the movers and shakers of your brand. Directly engage your customers to improve your customer service ratings.
2. Reputation Defender (MyPrivacy: $9.95 per month, MyReputation: $14.95 per month)
With Reputation Defender, you can search for and eliminate any mentions of you on the web. Develop your online image with Reputation Defender’s PR techniques, tailored to accentuate your brand image.
3. Twazzup (Free)
This is a free service which allows you to monitor one keyword on Twitter. It is excellent for getting an understanding about who is talking about you and your company.
4. Visible Technologies (Call for pricing)
Take advantage of the many social media outlets with visible Technologies’ service. You receive keyword analysis, monitoring, promotion of posts on networks like Digg, Twitter and MySpace. With this monitoring service, you can get a better idea of where you stand on the social media landscape.
5. Sentiment Metrics (Starts at $400 per month, depending on keyword requirements)
Sentiment Metrics allows users to directly engage with customers about their brands. Most social media outlets are searched, including forums, blogs and Twitter. The real time dashboard delivers information in an easy to use manner.
6. BuzzLogic (Call for pricing)
This firm takes a hard look at the influence that your ad campaign is having on the demographic groups that you are targeting. Create your own advertising campaign and analyze the results with a comprehensive review of your keyword searches. BuzzLogic has cutting-edge technology available for you to get the most from your brand.
7. Mutual Mind (Call for pricing)
This program looks for your specific keywords and compares them in a positive or negative light. You can get both brand intelligence and competitive intelligence. This company promises to give you in depth analytics so that you can get a great idea of what’s going on.
8. Cymfony (Call for pricing)
Cymfony’s Orchestra has a dashboard which allows you to cull through thousands of pieces of information, meaning you can look for a multitude of various metrics. The software looks beyond your specified keywords, focusing on the grammatical usages to provide you with a better insight on your searches.
9. Trackur (Starts at $18 per month for 5 keywords, up to $377 per month for unlimited)
Trackur’s basic service provides email alerts, custom filters, and the ability to share and bookmark items. Your keywords are tracked across multiple media outlets and comprehensive results are delivered to you on your web based dashboard. (Pricing: S. Web Based)
10. Tweetdeck (Free)
Place your keyword phrases into the interface so you can monitor LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. The program provides a directory to offer keyword suggestions. This free application is available for the iPad, iPhone and your windows desktop.
Your social media reputation is important. With monitoring, you can quickly and effectively research and engage in the conversations happening all over the web.
This post is contributed by James Adams, a staff writer at an ink cartridges store where he writes reviews of newly released products such as the HP 901XL as well as blog posts about design and media.
While Radian 6 is undoubtedly a solid platform, it can become very expensive quickly. The $600 per month is for a single license and so can soon add up for multiple clients with different terms needed per client ($7200 per year per license).
Meltwater Buzz is a great product that we've been trying and is a more than viable alternative. It's $13,000 per year, but that's for 5 licenses with a more in-depth historical search. Definitely worth a look.
Hi Danny
I've actually heard of Meltwater – they were in touch with a colleague of mine regarding social media monitoring for a city rebranding campaign. They seem like a reasonable option, but I am wondering having never used meltwater….is $13,000 really worth it?
Do you believe it possible to achieve a similar result by setting up automatic Google searches with email alerts, using Tweetdeck's twitter, using facebooks public API and monitoring Linkedin's Q&A? Would this get you 80% of the way there or would the analytics be missing?
If it's just for one client, then probably not. However, no-one works with just one client, do they?
Look at Radian 6 – it's $7,200 per year per license. Go for the five licenses that Meltwater gives you and your looking at $36,000 compared to Meltwater's $13,000. So then it becomes, is Radian 6 worth it?
Every company in the space (and even those that aren't) should be monitoring. So your colleague would have a license for their business; a license for the client; and three left for other projects. Now the value kicks in.
You can definitely get a lot of information from free tools, but they can be haphazard at times. Google Alerts especially comes back with some interesting suggestions and information at times. And obviously the free searches don't always take into account sentiment, influencer and social reach algorithms into account.
It depends on the level you want to dig into; that will often dictate best value or resource.
Thanks for including Radian6 in your list Sammy. Normally I wouldn't make any comment on a blog about our products or pricing but since there may be some confusion here I thought I'd jump in.
Hey there Danny, long time no chat. I just wanted to point out how we define “licenses” so that folks didn't get confused on the comparison. For us, license refers to a user license. You pick up as many user licenses as you need based on the folks who'll be using the service. In some cases that could be one person or in another case it could be 100. A user license is $100 per month which now also includes a free user license to use the Engagement Console (something very unique to Radian6). You can use the Engagement Console for engagement in team situations and/or for tagging and classifying posts for reporting later on etc…
Then we have topic profiles. The standard topic profile is $500/month or $6000 per year. If the volume of traffic is over 10000 mentions per month the pricing scales up from there. You generally set up a topic profile for each brand you want to monitor and also include it's competitors and some key industry terms. All of these plans are month to month so if you need a topic for 2 months you just pay for two months.
We've tried to pack lots of functionality into the monthly plans as possible and to make the pricing as flexible in terms of client needs as we can.
Hope this helps a bit.
Cheers.
@davidalston
Radian6
Hey there David,
But that's my point, fella
If I used the term license incorrectly, I'll rephrase.
Say you want to use 5 topics with Radian6 and a user per topic, so that will mean a license too (from my understanding of your explanation).
So, for five different brands, that would equate to:
5 x topics @ $6,000 per year per topic = $30,000. Plus 5 x user licenses @ $100 per user per month, x 12 months = $6,000 for the year. That takes Radian 6 to $36,000.
Compare that to Meltwater:
5 topics plus 5 licenses with 5 different users (they're inclusive) = $13,000 per year.
No-one's saying Radian 6 isn't a top-notch platform, but it can get pretty expensive, pretty quick.
Thanks Danny. Fair enough. Should have also mentioned that when companies start getting into multiple users and topic profiles with us we have various enterprise value packages that provide for various levels of discounts. But you're right, different products, different functionality, different pricing. Take care eh.
Thanks Sammy for the space to converse on this.
Great post! All stellar platforms! It's important to realize that all of these platforms process and present information a little bit differently from each other – different metrics, different reports, different social media channels – although on the surface they all monitor.
I'd love to get Attensity360 (formerly Biz360) on the list for future posts, if you do any more. I'm happy to show you around — we are working on some really cool stuff post-acquisition by Attensity around advanced text analytics. It's pretty affordable for what it is, and we don't charge by volume – it's a steady rate of $399 for 5 topics per month – tracking and measuring sentiment across blogs, online news, discussion forums (inc. LinkedIn, Facebook, user forums, etc), microblogs (Twitter and GBuzz) and video. Finally, because such a huge part of our customer base is in global, we offer monitoring in 16 languages.
Feel free to ping me anytime!
- Maria Ogneva, Attensity
@themaria
What I love about your comment and this thread in general (other then the great discussion ) is the fact that both yourself and David Alston are clearly using your own software to great effect.
I will look at doing an update on this post in 6-12months time once the web world move on a bit and will definitely include your service if appropriate.
Thanks for taking the time to comment Maria.
That's so nice of you to point it out
We do try to eat our own dogfood (or rather drink or own champagne – just a better mental image 
– do you have a similar saying in New Zealand?
What I also love about this post is that we are all over the world, participating in a discussion about platforms and social media in general, which inherently connects all of us, around an area of passion, with no regard to geography, timezone, or any other factor that could've separated us in the past.
Hoping that by the time of your next release, I will have something to show you that will knock your socks off!
Cheers!
- Maria @themaria