So we have seen how best to monitor social media marketing accounts as separate entities but if you are working on many accounts across different social media platforms a better way to spend your resources could be an all-encompassing social media monitoring company who take all social media accounts, blogs and even webpages into account.

Here is a rundown of some of the most popular Social Media Marketing monitoring platforms on the market.

Radian6 www.radian6.com

This social media marketing monitoring platform is owned by the SalesForce.com (a CRM platform used by company sales teams to input sales data). This background gives them a great understanding of how companies work and what they need. Radian6 is a successful and well-designed monitoring platform. It has the power to track mentions on more than 100 million social media sites (amongst other things)!

Their social media dashboard is the main USP and is similar in looks to social managers such as hootsuite and tweetdeck but comes with a wealth of information, which is displayed in digestible graphs and tables.

You can monitor:
  • Brand strength
  • Volume
  • Sentiment
  • Demographics
  • Influences
  • Specific content
  • Trends

It is a great social media marketing platform if you are looking for a one stop social media marketing shop; but like all great products it comes with a price! Unlike the other platforms we have been discussing in the previous blogs there are no free access to any analytics. To have the social media dashboard you need to pay – and it’s not cheap! $600 for the basic package and $10,000 for the full works per month! This really is a great time saving devise, however… we would say that most the information on here could be sourced elsewhere is you have the time to do the leg work and then put it into a pretty report.

If you have cash to splash rather than time to burn this is a great platform with a great support system from a dedicated account manager.

Lithium www.lithium.com

Lithium works differently to Radian6 as it is an all-encompassing social media company as they train you and give you the equipment (non tangible!) to find the information yourselves.  They operate in two stages; Launch and Management & Optimization. Launch involves tailoring a strategy to your unique needs by designing a customised interface, bringing existing customer data into the software and training your social media staff. Management & Optimization is all about obsessively moving the needle to obtain the best results. They help you run integrated social media campaigns through their software and with their support and of course provide detailed metrics much as Radian6 does.

On to the cost! It comes in a much more reasonable $249 a month for five users and five searches and you can try it for free on their 14-day trial.

BrandWatch www.brandwatch.com

Finally a UK based company playing with the big boys in terms of social media marketing monitoring services! BrandWatch offer anything from a simple monitoring project to in depth Analyst Reports or API integration for your social media marketing.

They work off key words (not just brand names as the company name suggests) which you send to them and then receive reports and brand summaries that you can then take action on through their recommendation. It is a simple tool that works out how much ‘buzz’ you and your competitors are generating. Technical support is offered in case you get bogged down- having said that it is not nearly as in depth at Radian6 or Lithium as it does not go into the depth and only really does key word analysis. The cost is £400 (yes pounds!) a month for the basic (Pro) reporting and up to £1500 a month for ‘Enterprise’ the cost is based on how many mentions a month they will report. The basic package includes 10,000 mentions.

How Sociable www.howsociable.com

Out of all the social media marketing analytic websites out there we probably found this the least useful. Once it loads (and sometimes it never does!)  It gives you a score for each social media platform based on one username – this was a problem for companies with two or more words in their name for example Tann Westlake. As on twitter due to the restrictions the name has no space – Tann Westlake – Sociable does not make this connection so you need to make two searches – one for Tann Westlake and one for Tann Westlake. Also the metrics you do receive don’t really tend to mean much! They are scored from 0 – 10 on how active your brand is, however we found that even global brands like MacDonalds and Coca Cola were struggling to get past 5! To get any more metrics you need to pay $19 a month for even the basic package – reaching to $199 a month for 100 different brand names.

These are by no means the only integrated social media marketing monitoring company’s out there so it is worth shopping around to find the one that best fits. Hopefully reading this has given you an idea of what it is that you think you need from the reports – in house help, integration with your systems, simple metrics or are you just better off doing it yourself to save money!?