Designing enterprise-worthy social media monitoring solutions for the largest companies in the world is can be a big challenge. Thankfully, I've always been able to find tools and team members that are up to the task.
Social media monitoring for small businesses can be as 'free and simple' as using Google Alerts and Social Mention to track brand-related conversations. But when it comes to implementing monitoring solutions for Fortune 500 brands, with thousands of physical locations, in a regulated industry, the stakes are higher and solutions can be costly. In this post, I'll share my favorite enterprise-level solution for social media monitoring.
Social Media Monitoring
The core social media monitoring tool you choose needs to monitor brand mentions across all social media platforms and public areas of the web. It's something that you'll use to track brand mentions to provide customer support, track brand sentiment, and benchmark your performance over time on social platforms. You'll also need a tool that allows you to monitor competitor brand mentions so that you can measure share of voice, and compare the sentiment, engagement and performance of your brand against competitors.
If your company has various physical locations or individual retail brands, you need the ability to track the same information for each of them, and top competitors. Lastly, you need to ability to monitor unbranded industry-related, product-related and customer-related keywords to mine consumer insights and find product-related ideas.
Over 10 past year, I've had the opportunity to demo, use, and configure a wide range of high-end social media monitoring tools. Although many high-end social media platforms offer limited monitoring capabilities, the best standalone tools for monitoring are Radian6 (part of the SalesForce Marketing Cloud), Crimson Hexagon, and Brandwatch. My favorite among these (and the one we use at U.S. Bank) is Brandwatch.
Brandwatch, which recently raised, $22 million to improve its social media monitoring platform, already has the best platform for doing the things described above. Why? Although Brandwatch offers consulting services and training services, we've been able to do more of the work ourselves (writing queries, creating dashboards, adding custom alerts) than we could with other platforms. The Brandwatch query syntax is simple and includes the basic boolean operators you need to create a custom query. As you write queries, you can see sample results and make adjustments, such as adding negative keywords, on the fly.
When Brandwatch queries are saved, you can choose to begin gathering data backwards in time (from previous months) - this is particularly helpful as a means to boost results for narrow queries (that return a low volume of current results). On the other end, you can choose to pull only a sample (portion of possible results) for queries that are broad.
The query writing process within Brandwatch does a few (sometimes frustrating) limitations. It doesn't support regular expressions or if/then logic - this means that you often need to create broader queries than you'd like and apply categories, tags, and filters to query data in order to refine results. Also, Brandwatch doesn't provide the ability to leave author comments within queries, so that you can note additions and changes that are made to queries over time. I'm hoping to see these kinds of improvements, and more comprehensive emoji support in 2016.
Brandwatch provides solid, functional dashboards to view, explore and filter query results - and the ability to set two flavors of email alerts. Custom alerts allow you to be notified of things you're looking for - such as negative brand mentions. Signal alerts notify you about things you don't know to ask for (when BrandWatch observes unusual trends in query-related data).
One of the most important things that Brandwatch offers in an API and the willingness to integrate with other social products, such as Spredfast. Brandwatch also acquired PeerIndex in 2015 and I'm looking forward to seeing those capabilities added into the mix.
This post originally appeared on the Social Meteor blog