Archive for month: June, 2017

Top 3 Paid Social Media Monitoring Tools

If you are thinking about investing in a social media monitoring tool, it can be hard to determine which is best for you. Below in our Top 3 Paid Social Media Monitoring Tools article we’ve listed three different types of paid-for tools that could help you maximise your social media status. This is the sequel to our 6 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools article. They all offer a free demo so you can try before you buy.

Sysomos

Sysomos prides itself on being an all-inclusive social media analytics tool, breaking it down into 5 key areas: research, listen, curate, engage and analyse. They claim to be “The world’s largest independent social intelligence platform” and have a broad client base including Porsche, NBC Universal and Heineken.

Now they don’t offer a price list on the website and so you need to speak to them with your budget in mind before you know how much you’ll pay. They do have multiple tools within their offering so depending on your needs, you may not have to pay for the whole package.

Sysomos MAP is their research platform, where you can view analytics for Boolean search queries relevant to your business from across the web.

Sysomos Heartbeat is their social media listening platform, where you can view mentions across multiple social media networks as well as forums, blogs and news sites.

Sysomos Expion is their social campaign manager, where you can schedule content calendars and engage with your audience directly.

Sysomos Analytics is their paid marketing analytics tool. This tool monitors the success of paid ad campaigns in real-time across multiple networks.

Sysomos Scout is their specific Facebook insights platform, pulling in all the data you need from your Facebook pages and managing it all under one roof.

Lastly, Sysomos Gaze is their visual marketing tool, pulling in analytics from images and video content.

Sysomos has a lot to offer and multiple tools to pick and choose from. All these tools certainly have their uses, and those with a big budget may like to have everything in one place. However, for those with lighter pockets, you might like to combine some of the Sysomos tools with some other free ones.

What we like: Analyses and gives insight into almost everything on the web which is relevant to your brand. Having everything in one place makes it very easy from a workflow perspective.

What is missing: Some social monitoring options are available elsewhere, some even for free. For example, Facebook insights vs Sysomos Scout and Hootsuite vs Sysomos Expion.

(Image courtesy of https://sysomos.com/products/heartbeat)

Brandwatch

Second place on the list of Top 3 Paid Social Media Monitoring Tools out there is Brandwatch. Brandwatch does not have the plethora of services that Sysomos offer, instead it focuses on two main areas of social monitoring: social listening and finding your target audience. This is certainly not a one-stop-shop platform for social media monitoring and you will need to use other tools in conjunction with it. Similarly to Sysomos, Brandwatch does not offer a price list but they have three tiers of plans with varying data access rights. The plans are based on number of mentions starting with 10,000 then jumping to 1 million and finally unlimited. Their current client list includes top brands British Airways, Sky and ASOS.

Brandwatch Analytics can track social media campaigns, offer competitor benchmarking, influencer identification and outreach, market research and reputation management. They seem to place most emphasis on finding influencers and reputation management which is great if you are a controversial or highly talked about brand. Their reputation management tool allows you to set up queries to pick up on important topics and you will be sent alerts immediately so that you don’t miss anything important.

Brandwatch doesn’t offer much in the way of scheduling or engagement from the platform, so another tool will be required to manage the day-to-day social media conversation as well as campaigns.

What we like: Uncomplicated and visual reports which are great for sharing with the wider business, one of Twitter’s official partners with access to the Firehose, historical data.

What is missing: No ability to manage social platforms from within the tool, no data for forums, blogs or news sites.

(Image courtesy of https://www.brandwatch.com/brandwatch-analytics/)

 

Hootsuite

And…Number three on the list of Top 3 Paid Social Media Monitoring Tools  is Hootsuite. Featured in our Free Social Media Monitoring Tools blog post, Hootsuite is a social media monitoring and engagement platform where you can manage all your social media accounts from one dashboard. As with Brandwatch, you will need to use other tools to discover deeper data about your social media presence.

The free plan has it’s limits so venturing into the paid plans unlocks a lot of other features. The plans are split into four and are priced based on the size of your business.

Professional £7.99 per month (1 user)

The professional plan offers users 10 social profiles to monitor on the system, along with content scheduling, content suggestions and real-time analytics.

Team £27.99 per month per user (1-5 users)

The team plan includes everything in the professional plan, bulk scheduling, customised analytics, a little bit of training and up to 20 social profiles.

Business £69.99 per month per user (5-10 users)

The business plan includes everything in the team plan as well as analytics exports, priority support, more training and up to 50 social profiles.

Enterprise Contact for pricing (10+ users)

Hootsuite say “Hootsuite Enterprise empowers large teams, departments and regions to drive results by safely and securely scaling social media across their entire organisation”. It seems you need to give them a ring to find out what this actually means in terms of features.

What we like: As with the free option, we like the ability to manage all your social media accounts in one place. Data exports are great, but only available on the more expensive plans.

What is missing: Hootsuite isn’t offering the vast volumes of data the other tools can provide.

(Image courtesy of http://signuptoday.hootsuite.com/pro-gbr-eng-br-pplans/)

 

If you would recommend any other paid social media monitoring tools, let us know in the comments!