A review of nine social media monitoring tools which can help you identify the people talking online in your vertical. Using these tools to identify influencers will help your business get the most from your online social efforts.
So – onto the project.Tested 8 of the leading social media monitoring tools for their ability to find influencers for the topic of baby food.Search ran for 1 month across all tools
They set up the query for you and have analysts on hand to sort the wheat from the chaff and remove spam. This can be tremendously helpful if you don;t have analyst resource in house and indeed its something to think about when choosing a tool. What will work for you?Synthesio – Best integration of features/interactivity of tools/user experience/ - they covered all bases with the tools. influencers, verbatim, communities – they all covered different aspects and gave a fuller picture. Best facebook – synthesio – they had the most relevant facebook results. “Bubble” diagram – the “Communites” tab of the dashboard– when synthesio crawl the web they index all the websites they find and they put into self-made categories that relate to topics discussed on the social web. Baby food is most discussed in the category of “Agrifood and Gastronomy”.Second screen shot – facebook influencers
Radian6 – Best Drill Down – so maAllows you to drill down in to data in several different ways.Range of ways to segment and sort data to enable you to customize the dashboard.Easy to user interface to enhance user experience.ny different ways to drill down
Perfect for giving you an overall view of where your influencers might be located.Allows you to drill down into results to find key information e.g. number of relevant posts.Very well integrated platform with easy to view influencer metrics.Best forum sites of influence – brandwatch – they identified great sites of influence, with very little spam/noise
Sysomos – Most exciting feature – twitter authority of people who follow influencersUnique feature include a tool that allows you to see the authority of people who are following influencers on Twitter.Allows you to find both sites of influence as well as individual influencers.Good segmentation of data.
Scout Labs – Best Youtube and Images search They pulled in the most results of all tools for youtube and images. Their results were also relevant – and there were some potential influencers. Gives key insights about influence at a glance, with the ability to also drill down into data.Functions like “key quotes” and “frequently used words” give insight into the online conversations.Simple and inviting user interface that is easy to use.
Most user friendly tool – attensity 360 – it was very easy to get to grips with Attensity 360 - Easiest tool to learn – easiest tool to come to grips wihIntegrates metrics well e.g. Klout scoresGives a broad picture about influencers and influence scores.Ability to add customised “user-defined metrics” to influencer search.
Alterian SM2– Best segmentation of data/Best slice and dice – so many ways to zone in on different areas of interest in the dataVery powerful tool which actually is very flexible. But because of that it’s not the easiest tool to learn to use and it might be one for those of you with some good solid analysts in the company. Image 1 – “popularity” is influence score – it shows how many results are in each level of influence. Influence 0-10 with 10 being the most influential. Image 2 – chart shows top domains where influencers reside when it comes to discussions about organic baby food. Drill down capabilities allow you to completely tailor results to focus on a particular site of influence.Easy to compare data.Well presented data with interactive graphs.
Social Radar – Best Features Visualiser Top Sources Tool – really great for allowing you to see the flow of information between potential influencers/and influencers. Allows you to see who influencers like/respect their opinion. Gives a broad overview of what conversations are taking place about your topic. Allows you to view the relationships between different sources of influence on the web using their infographic style “Visualizer” tool
Peer Index – The One to watch – their tool looks promising. It’s based on the authority you have in a particular topic and uses the data primarily from twitter, linked in and facebook. Right now they’re only focused on twitter, but when they expand to other channels it should be very exciting.