Moving Beyond Alerts – Social media monitoring and measurement

GCAI Social Media News: Moving Beyond Alerts – Social media monitoring and measurement.

Like PR agencies around the country, we have moved beyond the social media management x 3 platforms approach.  Basically that means we listen with one, engage with another, and achieve with perhaps a third.  Management of the social media platforms for multiple clients has been quite labor intensive using this approach (for those who want to know we have approximately 30 plus platforms under management current and that number is expanding rapidly).

For years (okay months – but that’s like years in social media development), we have used Hoot Suite for engagement (and management-lite) for multiple client presences on social media, Trackur and then BrandsEye for monitoring (backed up by Google Alerts and Social Mention), and Socialware sync for archiving.  Our goal: do it all through one platform. Here is our review of what we have found to date:

HootSuite (free)
Exporting. Allows us to post and reply on Twitter and Facebook for multiple clients.  Convenient because everything is in one place.

Trackur (free)
Listening. Tested it for about a month, but didn’t keep it.  Could be described as a “poor man’s version of BrandsEye.”  It missed a lot of content that it should have picked up.

BrandsEye (Fee)
Listening. Allows for multiple search terms. Ability to mark each found item as relevant or irrelevant. A robust analytics package is available, but for a steep one-time price.

Socialware Sync (Free 2 year trial)
Archiving. Pulls in all Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn mentions.  Also allows for searching within the archive.  Only negative so far is that when it exports the data it is an .XML file which is not easy to read and is not presentable to clients.

Sprout Social (Fee)
Listening and exporting. We are testing this platform out with a free trial and so far we like the dashboard and the analytics it gives. We’ve had issues with some of the monitoring features and not much help from their customer service.

Social Volt (Fee)
Listening, exporting, and archiving. Recently had a live demo which looked promising.  It has not gone live yet and appears to be out of our price range.

In Research Lab Currently:

Mutual Mind (Fee)
Listening and exporting. Live demo is set up for later this week.  We’ll let you know how it goes.

Beevolve (Fee)
Social Media Monitoring and Insights platform. No data yet, but the company called us after we attended Monitoring Social Media Boston and expect to research this platform next.

Questions?  Feel free to email me. – Laura