I am part of a panel tonight at Social Media Club Phoenix on Social Media Monitoring. As part of my prep for the panel, I have been doing some extra thinking about the various monitoring options out there. This isn’t meant to be a complete list. Rather it is a list of the monitoring options I use and like.
Free options:
Kurrently.com – Monitors what is said about you/your brand on Twitter and Facebook. Allows you to scope your results by either platform or all results. Also allows you to change the search platform. Results are easy to read and straight forward. You can even get them as an RSS feed, if you are willing to pay for it.
SocialOomph.com – Will send you an update of tweets on a topic every 12 or 24 hours. As a free member, you can monitor one keyword set. Paid members have the option to set up more monitors. Also allows you to do auto-posting and scheduled posting to multiple Twitter, Buzz, and StatusNet accounts for free. Paid members can also set up accounts for FaceBook. blogs, and Ping.fm. The auto-posting and click statistics are good. The rest? I can live without it.
SocialMention.com – Live monitoring, plus the option of a daily HTML email. Live monitoring can be done at any time on any search term. Live monitoring is great, when it works. (Sometimes it is slow/incomplete.) If you wish, you can create a CSV file of the results as well as files with the sentiment, keywords, users, and hashtags for your search term. No reply or tracking available. In the past, I have had a problem canceling email alerts. (That may have gotten better lately.) The biggest plus for SocialMention: They attempt to search everywhere. The biggest minus: There is no timeframe given for the results.
Trackur.com – Give them a keyword, filter it as desired, tell it to exclude your own domain (or some other), and set the system searching. Trackur comes back with a dead simple chart of the daily result counts, as well as the most recent results. Filter the results by date or sentiment if you want. Sort them by influence or sentiment. Export your results to a CSV file so that you can work with them yourself. An added bonus: Save your search and let the site run in your browser. The system will update your results about every 30 minutes.
TweetDeck/CoTweet/HootSuite/Seesmic, etc. – Each of the main Twitter client has built in the ability to perform live searches on keywords. The results are Twitter only. There is no way to save the results. Response is built into each of the clients, but tracking and assigning of items isn’t in TweetDeck.
Paid options:
UberVu.com - UberVu has a limited free option that lets you search for terms and see basic analytics. Terms are monitored over Twitter, WordPress, and Discus for free. If you are a paid user, you get much better analytics and tracking, better filtering, PDF and Excel exports, assignments for activity, plus additional sources (Facebook, Buzz, MySpace, and more). The site and the data has improved massively over recent months, but the cost has gone up as well.
justSignal.com – A Scottsdale company, justSignal allows you to monitor mentions of individual terms or complex search strings. They cover a wide range of the social web, including Twitter, YouTube, Backtype, blogs, and more. They will set up a trial for you in some circumstances, but they are mostly a paid service. Using the live monitoring page of the site, you can see a wide range of analytics, as well as three different sets of content details from Twitter, Flickr, blog entries, and blog comments. The one thing I love most about their system? Daily and weekly email PDF reports with charts and analysis of your mentions and reach.
Sysomos.com – Now a part of Marketwire, Sysomos has a monitoring side (Heartbeat) and a tracking side (MAP). The two sides combine are one of the best measurement and monitoring systems that exist. The data is verified and cleaned regularly. The customer support is awesome. The interface is great. The reporting and statistical analysis is better than any other system I have used. There isn’t much not to love about Sysomos. The only reason they aren’t my only solution? The price. They are aimed at the enterprise user (for the most part) and the pricing shows it.
My evaluation
If you are just looking to monitor the mentions of a small product or company, a combination of the free systems will get you where you want to go. They each give you a different picture, so you won’t want to depend on just one of the systems. You will need to do your own measurement and analysis off the results they give, but it is doable.
If you have the money to spend on a paid system, go with the one that best fits your budget. justSignal or Sysomos would be my first choices, but if you can’t afford them… go with UberVu.
Want a test term for your own monitoring system evaluation? Do what I did… search for “OneNote” – the solution for all your note taking needs. Unique term, currently being talked about, and safe for work.
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7 comments
1 ping
Tom Malkin
July 26, 2010 at 1:39 pm (UTC -7)
Appreciated reading your comments and thought you’d appreciate this option as well. I’m with GeeYee, and our Social Media Analysis Service recently won a Great Mind Award from the Advertising Research Foundation for quickly delivering deeper insights into “entire product categories” (let alone a brand or product) on unlimited, “relevant data” for $1,000.
Check out the Tiger Woods and ARF-Starcom 360 Measurement case studies and contact me at tom@geeyee if you’d like to see an online demo:
Tiger Woods: https://www.geeyee.com/blog/2010/05/may-2010-tiger-woods-case-study
ARF-Starcom: https://www.geeyee.com/blog/2010/05/arf-360-measurement-workshop-at-starcom-mediavest-group
CallKathy
July 9, 2010 at 11:34 am (UTC -7)
Always glad to recommend great products. Hoping more peeps try out Trackur!
CallKathy
July 9, 2010 at 11:34 am (UTC -7)
Thanks for adding the cost to the information here. I thought you might want to know that I wasn’t the only one to recommend justSignal last night.
CallKathy
July 9, 2010 at 11:32 am (UTC -7)
The presentation last night went great. Thought you might want to know that I wasn’t the only one to suggest Sysomos!
40deuce
July 9, 2010 at 11:29 am (UTC -7)
Hi Kathy,
Thanks so much for the great recommendation of Sysomos.
Hope the pannel goes well!
Cheers,
Sheldon, community manager for Sysomos
Brian Roy
July 9, 2010 at 9:36 am (UTC -7)
Kathy,
Thanks for the great review of justSignal! While we are a paid service we are happy to offer free trials. In addition we think our bang for the buck – at just $59/month can’t be beat.
Thanks again for the reccomendation!
Brian Roy
Andy Beal
July 8, 2010 at 5:21 pm (UTC -7)
Hi Kathy, thanks for including Trackur in your recommendations!
Good luck on your panel!
Andy Beal
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