Surveying Social Media: Social Media Analytics Software

Monitoring your social media efforts is an important part of achieving success – knowing if your followers are increasing, when they are (and at what prompts), and who they are, will allow you to truly tap into the needs and wants of your clientele, and create targeted social media content.

There are several types of software that can help you both determine this vital information and then develop and monitor the content that you create based on these results. Let’s take a look at some of these tools.

Radian6:

Pricing: This software offers a range of price options. One topic and the first 10,000 content returns costs $600 per month. At the higher end, for $4,000 per month, you will get 200,000 results on six topics.

Features: The analysis dashboard is a comprehensive and thorough tool, amassing results from social media outlets across the web; it also collects all your mentions in one place. The engagement console allows you to see and monitor responses to these mentions and other inquires – it also allows for easier information sharing between your departments. The summary dashboard and the mobile versions also quickly distill the main points for when you need information fast! Other user-friendly features include training videos, web support and webinars.

Additional Features: The advanced package comes with Google Analytics, Webtrends and Omniture, as well as providing the option to get sentiment analysis through Insights and work with salesforce.com

Big Name Customers: American Red Cross, H & R Block.

Spredfast:

Pricing: Flexible. Contact them to discuss your business needs and available options.

Features: Error handling; content review scheduling option; White Label option; Top Ten Lists. Error handling is a particularly important tool, as it prevents you from losing your work due to possible site outages. The option to schedule content for review before publication is also important as it allows you to check the consistency and accuracy in all your content before it hits the Web. For comprehensive branding, White Label is the offered option. Finally, Top Ten Lists cover a range of topics, helping you to incorporate new options into your strategy.

Additional Features: Like Radian6 and others, Spredfast offers integration with Google Analytics, Omniture, and salesforce.com, and mobile features. It also allows you your own content management in publication and promotion across your departments.

Big Name Customers: Nokia, AARP.

Simply Measured:

Pricing: Plans start at $500/month, with the option of a free trial.

Features: Comprehensive and thorough for social media monitoring. Allows you to track keywords, hash tags, video mentions, locations of users, etc. What’s more, all data accumulated is reported to you via an Excel file: organized and easy accessible . You can also combine multiple accounts into one report.

Additional Features: Facebook analytics and Twitter analytics. These options allow you to track your growth on these two sites down to minute detail; you can track Fan Pages, search comments for keywords, and, on Twitter, observe your success tweet by tweet. They also offer you a brand comparison option, to see how you match up to your competitors.

Big Name Customers: Levi’s; Alaska Airlines

Crimson Hexagon:

Pricing: Flexible. Contact a sales representative to discuss your options.

Features: Claims to offer “mathematical precision” in a “sea of opinion, information and data available in social media.” Standard sentiment analysis here is pumped up as CH reports their analytics are so thorough they can discern patterns in content with a 97% accuracy rate.

Additional Features: Gives the option to calculate your return on investment from any of your marketing and promotional campaigns.

Big Name Clients: CNN; monster.com; Johnson & Johnson; The Huffington Post.

Sysomos:

Pricing: Flexible. Contact for options and pricing plans.

Features: Provides information from more than 8 million posts per hour, in a variety of languages – perfect for the business looking for global attention. The dashboard allows you to run Facebook Pages, Twitter, and format data while filtering spam messages.

Additional Features: Automatic sentiment analysis which focuses on the groups most talking about you, providing you with all the know-how to create further content aimed at these users. Also uses Boolean search tactics to achieve search results that are most relevant to you and your brand.

Big Name Clients: the BBC; Coca-Cola; Microsoft.

As you can see, there are multiple software programs out there, ready to help you make your social media networking easier and even more successful. Play around, and see which one is right for you!