Table of Contents
Sprout Social
Full Service Listening With Analytics
Bottom Line:
Sprout Social is a full-service social media management tool, and has the best mix of social media management and analytics to meet the needs of most small to midsize businesses (SMBs).
PROS
- Manages social media channels and brands in a cohesive and powerful dashboard.
- Solid reporting capabilities.
- Strong social CRM and help desk features.
CONS
- Social listening and keyword monitoring options are limited in Basic tier.
- Adding multiple users can get expensive for SMBs.
Synthesio
Enterprise Analytics and Customization
Bottom Line:
For enterprise-scale social media analytics, Synthesio is a great option. The platform offers excellent monitoring capabilities, business value metrics, and other marketing features that easily make it one of our Editors' Choices for large organizations.
PROS
- Extensive enterprise level analytics features.
- Powerful community analysis and limitless data queries.
- Interactive data visualization, reports, and social ROI metrics.
- Can analyze emojis.
- Easy to use drag-and-drop pivot table.
CONS
- Meant for larger enterprises.
- Does not have publishing features.
- Smaller SMBs should look elsewhere.
Sysomos
Good Social Campaign Management
Bottom Line:
Sysomos is another enterprise-oriented player in the social media management space. Excellent analytics and a strong selection of campaign management features make this a standout product and one of our Editors' Choice winners.
PROS
- Extensive suite of social media management capabilities.
- Features like Buzz Graph and Tweet Life are useful and intuitive.
- Targeted social campaign data.
- Strong social campaign management functionality.
CONS
- Data visualizations can take some time to load.
- Unclear pricing.
- SMBs are priced out.
Talkwalker
Comprehensive With Good Data Visualizations
Bottom Line:
Talkwalker is a social media management tool that's laser focused on tracking a brand's global online reputation and sentiment through online, social, print, TV, and radio. The tool generates actionable insights and competitive metrics.
PROS
- Comprehensive suite of actionable social monitoring and data visualization tools.
CONS
- Expensive option for smaller businesses.
- New image recognition capability is only available in enterprise tier.
Brand24
Strong Listening and Influencer Analytics
Bottom Line:
Brand24 does a good job of providing a lot of feature functionality in a clean and fairly easy-to-learn user interface. While it can get pricey if you exceed certain quotas, it's still well worth a look for small business digital marketers.
PROS
- Strong listening, mention, and influencer analytics features.
- Affordable pricing tiers that don't strip features for SMBs.
- Attractive user interface.
- Slack integration.
CONS
- Costs add up when quotas are exceeded.
- Can only archive a year's worth of social data.
- Not a social content creation utility.
Brandwatch Analytics
Strong Analytics and Brand Management
Bottom Line:
Brandwatch Analytics does a good job ticking off the boxes that small to midsized businesses are looking for in a social media analytics solution. While it can get a little expensive compared to the competition, the platform's robust analytics make it well worth a look.
PROS
- Robust analytics features.
- Large variety of integrations.
- Strong audience reporting, real-time monitoring, and alerting features.
- Great brand management.
CONS
- Expensive for the typical small to midsize business (SMB).
- Vague pricing structure.
- No publishing.
Crimson Hexagon
Expensive but Solid Sentiment Analysis
Bottom Line:
Crimson Hexagon is a top tier social media analytics platform for enterprises with a glossy interface and exceptional sentiment analysis.
PROS
- Top-notch sentiment analysis rooted in machine learning algorithm.
- Improved sentiment and image analysis.
- Innovative non-Boolean complex social searches with HelioSight.
- Live social stream monitoring.
- Best interactive visualizations for keyword and hashtag data.
CONS
- Too expensive for SMBs.
- Doesn't lack for any core functionality, but listening metrics and influencer analytics lack creativity and deeper-dive data.
Klear Advanced
Good for New Digital Marketers
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.
PROS
- Perfect for the marketer new to social media.
- Not complicated.
CONS
- Only one workspace allotted as tested so cannot assign tasks to teammates.
Mention
Intuitive and Good For Beginners
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 you get to the Company plan.
PROS
- Clean, intuitive interface.
- No credit card needed for 30-day trial of most plans.
CONS
- Slow technical support.
- Limited FAQs and "How-To" article library.
BuzzSumo Agency
Comprehensive With Backlink Tracing
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 influencer identification feature set and data analytics to compete with the major players.
PROS
- Unique backlink tracing.
- Tracks shares more comprehensively than any other platform.
- Content Alerts are great for real-time brand monitoring.
CONS
- No Instagram monitoring.
- No engagement metrics outside Facebook Analyzer.
- Emphasis on shares can be limiting and redundant.
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.
