We test and compare 10 of the most capable social media monitoring and audience analysis platforms for enterprises and SMBs to help your business make the most of its social investment.
What is Social Media Listening?
Social management and analytics isn't just about firing off content and then tracking views and shares. The platforms through which you oversee your company's brand and social media presence are often the front line for today's digital marketing campaigns, customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives, and the primary channel for interacting with new generations of users. That's a lot of information you're putting out across a lot of different channels. Putting that information out there is certainly a good thing, but an even better thing is having some idea of who is listening and what they think of all your hard work.
There are plenty of ways to gauge your company's social effectiveness, from measuring your social maturity to having a Social CRM strategy in place. But the easiest way to gauge your social media presence is by listening. The definition of social listening varies but the gist is this: Monitoring digital media channels to learn about your customers, your competition, and relevant business growth opportunities in the social sphere—be it content topics, hashtags and keywords, or simply users who are either already following you or should be.
Once you're listening (i.e., running queries, monitoring trends, gathering data, and generating reports and user lists), then you need to do something with all of that information. In this roundup, we review 10 of the most powerful social media platforms that go beyond surface-level analytics to provide deep social listening data and influencer identification features for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
Platforms such as Brandwatch Analytics Pro, Crimson Hexagon, Talkwalker, and Editors' Choices Synthesio and Sysomos are enterprise-grade social monitoring tools that also come with enterprise-sized price tags. Klear Advanced and Editors' Choice Sprout Social Premium are better suited for small to midsize businesses (SMBs). Then there are tools such as Brand24 Premium, BuzzSumo Agency, and Mention, with plans and feature sets to scale up or down for both small and larger businesses. Some are focused solely on listening and influencers while others roll that functionality into platforms that also do built-in publishing and social content curation. But they're all designed to help businesses gather, decipher, and make use of massive quantities of social data.
How to Spot a Worthwhile Social Listening Tool
Social listening is, of course, about comprehensive monitoring of all your social media presences and the topics buzzing around them. But the mark of a truly useful tool is the ability to search, filter, and refine that data to extract information of real business value. That starts with querying. All of the platforms we tested include query engines that can parse social data with different levels of complexity—from searching for keywords, hashtags, and mentions to running more advanced queries using Boolean logic.
Several of the enterprise platforms, in particular, shine in this respect, such as the MAP search tool in Sysomos. This tool includes both simple and advanced Boolean search on keywords and related terms. It even builds the Boolean query for you, with all of the ANDs and ORs and other operators to teach users how to structure more complex social queries. Crimson Hexagon, Synthesio, and Talkwalker are similarly detailed, allowing you to run queries up to a million characters in length. They also allow you to add filters on top of searches to sift through results by geographic location, demographic information, and specific social networks.
All of those query results then have to go somewhere, and the best social listening tools give you a selection of sleek reports, custom dashboards, and interactive data visualizations to make sense of the data, view the metrics about which you care, and get a full picture of your brand mentions, particular keywords or hashtags, or your audience breakdown. Look for more targeted metrics such as sentiment analysis (i.e., the overall feeling towards a brand or topic based on the prevailing positive, negative, or neutral opinions of queried social posts), share-of-voice, or community analysis, on top of the typical stats you'll see such as shares, reach, and engagement.
Reports are often made up of interactive bar and line graphs, pie charts, and more eye-catching data visualizations such as geographic heat maps. These heat maps show how viral a social topic is around the world, or they show word clouds and buzz graphs by visualizing the most prevalent terms and associated keywords in all of the posts you're searching for across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube. Tools such as BuzzSumo Agency have even generated their own trending scores, which measure virality by how quickly content is racking up shares or its mention frequency.
Though the social listening tools that really stand out are the ones with reporting features or visualizations that frame data in a way you hadn't considered before. The ones that don't just present you with data, they transform it for you through business intelligence (BI) and tie the data they're gathering directly to revenue or to how social metrics translate to your organization's return on investment (ROI). For example, Synthesio includes a whole ROI tab in its dashboard measuring acquisition—showing how effectively social engagement has converted followers into customers. Crimson Hexagon's Topic Clusters, wheels, and waves, as well as the Buzz Graphs in Sysomos help show the correlation between different keywords and hashtags to help businesses identify new topics and audiences to target. Social listening data is most effective as the context for making business decisions.
The Trick to Effective Influencer Identification
The other half of that context is knowing what social audiences to target with your next marketing campaign or brand-awareness initiative. It's identifying the users with the clout, following, and expert status in a given topic area in order to engage and turn them into customers or brand ambassadors. Influencer identification is how you find those users, and influencer management features are what you use to sort those key users into groups and lists for targeted campaigns.
As with social listening, it all starts with queries. You need to know who you're looking for in the most specific of terms. Influencer identification should be baked into all of the social search functionality in a platform. If a user comes up in a search on "Android' and you think they'd be a good influencer, you should be able to hit a button within those search results to add them to a list. Most tools give users custom influencer scores, and tools such as Brandwatch Analytics Pro and Klear Advanced help you sort the influencers worth targeting before categorizing them into lists. Sysomos takes this a step further, providing a scatterplot-type graph view that breaks influencers into distinct communities, matching features such as Synthesio's Psychographics for the more comprehensive community analysis capabilities I tested.
Though what's more important (than even identifying and categorizing influencers into lists) is the ability to apply the audience groups you've created for your business directly to customer and follower growth, or to export them directly into a social marketing campaign on platforms such as Twitter Ads. Twitter is the medium in which influencers are located most prominently and have the most measurably pronounced impact. The most powerful, proactive audience growth capabilities I tested came from Sysomos, which goes beyond the CSV export by using machine learning algorithms in "look-alike lists" to automatically grow follower lists (and to create lists of related influencers exported directly into Twitter ad campaigns). No other tool did as much of the list growth legwork, and I think more influencer identification tools will be soon adopting these sorts of algorithmic growth techniques.
If the Enterprise or SMB Shoe Fits
The social listening and influencer identification tool your company chooses will depend a great deal on your company's size and how much you're prepared to spend. But it's also about the kind of return you're looking for on your social investment. Some business models are predicated more on driving traffic and monitoring brand sentiment, while other brands and organizations are more focused on running queries for the express purpose of targeting new audiences and driving marketing revenue.
A small business that's more concerned with the former (i.e., driving traffic and monitoring brand sentiment) and looking for a "one-stop content curation and publishing shop" will be better suited to Editors' Choice Sprout Social Premium. Global brands that are tracking and analyzing staggering amounts of social data should gravitate toward enterprise offerings such as our two other Editors' Choices, Synthesio and Sysomos. Or, maybe your business is somewhere in the vast middle, investing in social for a whole host of reasons, with a unique selection of metrics key to its bottom line. When shopping for a social listening and influencer identification tool, the most important thing to know first is the reason you're looking for it.
Featured Social Listening and Influencer Identification Tool Reviews:
Sprout Social Review
Editors' Choice
$99.00 MSRP
Bottom Line: Sprout Social offers the best variety of social source monitoring, great built-in publishing and curation, and an expanding arsenal of reports across social networks, cleverly integrated wit...
Synthesio Review
Editors' Choice
$1200.00 MSRP
Bottom Line: When it comes to enterprise-scale social media analytics, Synthesio does it all. The platform's scope of monitoring, social audience breakdown tools, and business value metrics are unmatched...
Sysomos Review
Editors' Choice
$1000.00 MSRP
Bottom Line: Sysomos is a social listening and influencer identification tool that can do it all, combined with Sysomos Expion for a full social media management and analytics package. If you're an enter...
Brandwatch Analytics Review
$899.00 MSRP
Bottom Line: Brandwatch Analytics is a well-equipped and more than capable social analytics, listening, and influencer identification tool to make sense of enterprise-scale social brand data and trends
Crimson Hexagon Review
$2000.00 MSRP
Bottom Line: Crimson Hexagon is a top tier social media analytics platform for enterprises with a glossy interface and exceptional sentiment analysis.
Talkwalker Review
$700.00 MSRP
Bottom Line: Talkwalker is a capable midrange-to-enterprise social media analytics platform with top marks in competitive benchmarking, pre-built dashboards, and complex querying.
Klear Advanced Review
$249.00 MSRP
Bottom Line: Klear Advanced is an engaging tool that's perfect for a small to midsize business (SMB) just starting a social media program. The downside is that the price only includes one seat.
Mention Review
$299.00 MSRP
Bottom Line: Mention is a social media analytics tool that makes it easy for businesses to get up to speed. Its analytics data is contained in one scroll down menu but data export is not included until y...
Brand24 Review
$99.00 MSRP
Bottom Line: Brand24 is a good option for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) who need fairly comprehensive social listening, influencer management, social analytics, and engagement metrics at a reasonabl...
BuzzSumo Agency Review
$239.00 MSRP
Bottom Line: BuzzSumo Agency is a young, capable platform for SMBs that shines with its sharing metrics and real-time social monitoring. But it's got some catching up to do in its listening and influence...
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