Social Media Monitoring Tools

Is your company talking about investing in social media or have you already taken the leap into the uncharted waters?  If you’ve already taken the leap, then hopefully you already have a social media strategy in place.  If you have not taken the leap, then you should make sure you’re ready for a social media program before you embark on your journey into social media.

One aspect you need to address when creating a social media program is to make sure you have some way to monitor social media activity around your brand.   There are plenty of tools out there to “monitor” social media, but which one is right for you?  The real answer may surprise you since the answer very well may be none of them.

All the current social media monitoring tools are flawed and have a long way to go before you can confidently say that you’re getting the full picture of social media activity and that the data is being processed and displayed to you in an accurate manner.

Because of this, it is not possible to truly rely on a single tool to fully engage with your audience in social media.  You’ll be able to engage a portion of it, but because these tools often miss a lot, and  in some cases the majority, of social media activity, you won’t be able to engage them all.

In addition, the reports that these tools give you are flawed as well.  There is often a lot of spam still in the results even though the tools have “removed the spam.”  There are also often times many irrelevant records that are returned that supposedly match your keyword strings.  This means you have to manually go through your results to make sure the records you have in the tool are good relevant records.  Going through this process is very arduous and can be a huge time suck if you have a large number of records.

The sentiment that some of the tools provide you is a whole other issue.  Again, it’s not very accurate and requires you to manually go through them if you want accurate data in your reports.

I could continue listing the flaws that the tools have and could go into further detail on each, but instead of knocking down the available tools, I think it would be better to go into what you should do.  What is the best tool or tools for you?

The best answer is likely the paid tool that best fits your needs and then also incorporating some of the free tools that are available.  Even though the paid tools are flawed, they are much better than having nothing or just trying to use a combination of free options.

I’ll leave you with a few of the paid and free options that are available to you.

Some of the paid tool options are:

A few of the many free options that can be combined to supplement your paid tools are:

August 28th, 2009 in In-House Marketing

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