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Social media is a key component for businesses of any size. Whether it’s a restaurant managing their Facebook page and Yelp reviews, or a massive corporation whose message must be coordinated and ultimately use social media to shift public opinion, there are a whole range of powerful tools available. Here we review a few of the free social media monitoring (SMM) options available to small and individual-run businesses, and the paid services for medium- and enterprise-scale companies.
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This category applies to big businesses, for whom multiple teams and members often have to access the same SMM tools and accounts, with adjustable permissions that play out as planned no matter who is using them, or where. Social listening and sentiment assessment — figuring out who is saying what about a business or terms related to it — are key, with in-depth analytics and tracking to make sense of it all, and ultimately making a positive difference in the online discourse. These are powerful and often expensive tools, let’s take a quick look at just a handful of them:
ExactTarget Marketing Cloud (SalesForce)
With ExactTarget you can manage email, mobile, social engagement and online marketing with a single cloud-based app. Radian6, acquired by SalesForce in 2011, provides the social listening technology, which offers real-time and retrograde analysis, and is integratable with Google Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst, Webtrends, and other platforms.
Supported networks: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube
Price: Between $400 and $3,750 a month from basic to corporate sized packages, with enterprise pricing available upon request.
Shoutlet lets brands wraps publishing, engagement, and analytics into a single platform. In addition to publishing content, users can create custom web apps and webpages, and launch entire campaigns based on predetermined criteria, then track their reach and efficacy. Shoutlet’s open API allows for integration with other customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, email service providers, and web analytics tools like Adobe SiteCatalyst.
Supported networks: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, FourSquare
Price: Not publicly disclosed
SocialWare is a module-based set of services designed for financial service firms, broken into categories of compliance, sales, IT, and marketing risk. The only vendor of its kind to have completed a Soc 2 Type II audit, it helps to coordinate one wage brand- and IT policy-compliant social campaigns while avoiding leaks of sensitive information and measuring campaign effectiveness.
Supported networks: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
Price: Not publicly disclosed
Votigo is a publishing and social tracking platform that makes it possible to organize and execute social media-driven contests, sweepstakes, and promo campaigns, including for mobile, while measuring how each customer interacts with the brand throughout the campaign. Different levels of permissions and multiple APIs for custom application integration are provided.
Supported networks: Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Vine, YouTube
Price: $25 a month for small businesses, up to $500 a month for enterprise (with an annual commitment).
SMM platforms for midsize businesses
SMM tools used by large enterprises differ from those used by mid-size companies is their ability to be used and managed by multiple users, as well as the scope and depth of the analytics data those tools present. It’s ideal for SMM platforms used by medium-sized businesses to feature social-listening tools that allow for quick and targeted replies to posts among several social media accounts, and to schedule updates for posting.
Here we’ll do an overview of SMM platforms ideal for mid-size businesses:
BuzzBundle is a desktop-based social media management dashboard that allows users to listen, join in on, and keep track of brand-related conversations across social media, Q&A sites, and other online forums. Schedule-delayed posting and time-distributed mentions and tracking are also available. The Enterprise version is to be released on November 23, 2015.
Supported networks: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, vKontakte, WordPress, forums (phpBB2, phpBB3, vBulletin 3, vBulletin 4)
Price: A limited version is available for free, with the fully featured Pro version going for a flat $199 fee (including 6 months of free search algorithm updates).
HootSuite is a cloud-based social marketing app (with mobile apps available as well) for managing social media activities across multiple platforms and accounts from a single dashboard. Team access, permissions settings, and social analytics tools are also included.
Supported networks: Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, WordPress, MySpace, Mixi
Price: A limited version is available for free, with an enhanced Pro version at $9.99 per month (including a 30-day free trial), and an Enterprise option offered at a rate that is not publicly disclosed.
SproutSocial offers solutions for mid-size and enterprise-size businesses, but like others on this rundown its core features include social listening, posting across multiple networks, at-a-glance analytics and CRM tools. Also included are collaborative features and HelpDesk integration with features like converting messages into support tickets.
Supported networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn
Price: Standard plans for $59 per user per month, Deluxe plans for $99 per user per month, and Team plans for three users at $99 a month. All plans include a 30-day free trial, Enterprise pricing is not publicly available.
Socialoomph makes it possible to post across multiple social networks, track mentions of specific keywords within those networks, locate and follow relevant people and accounts, and more. Additional helpful features include a Daily Direct Message Digest sent via email, bulk uploads of multi-line tweets, and postponed publishing across blogs with remote publishing APIs.
Supported networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plurk
Price: 7-day free trial with signup, Twitter Unlimited version for $6.97 every two weeks, and Professional version for $17.97 every two weeks.
Free social media tools for small businesses
Most small businesses can’t afford hundreds of dollars a month for social media tools whose impact on profits wouldn’t be worth the money anyway. Still, managing online reputation and activity, and maximize the impact of social media marketing are very useful to businesses of any size. Here are a few options for the smaller operations with limited resources and budgets to spend on monitoring their online presence.
A free service created by the search engine giant, Google Alerts is an easy way to receive notice whenever a company name, brand or related topic is mentioned online. Based on user-set tags, Google sends an email straight to their inbox immediately, on a schedule or in digests. Like its search engine, there are useful tricks and features, like site-specific search operators and functions for removing and/or disambiguating search terms.
TweetDeck is a Twitter-owned dashboard that makes it easy to manage tweets, Twitter pages and personal accounts. Track tweets on a topic, follow specific people and accounts, and schedule postings with a tool that’s straightforward and, most importantly, free. If you’re on Twitter in anything more than a casual capacity, Tweetdeck is an essential and easily accessible tool.
EdgeRank is a Facebook measurement algorithm that shows how likely a given Facebook post is to make it to followers’ news feeds. Originally set to three factors — user affinity, content weighting, and a time-based decay parameter — EdgeRank has been expanded to include around 100,000 discrete parameters. As such, the data is not always easy to decipher, but EdgeRank Checker makes it possible to run a quick check of your EdgeRank Score and get a sense for the popularity of an account’s Facebook posts.
SocialMention is basically a search engine for public opinion, making it easy to search for terms and content associated with a company or brand. It will scour Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and a whole range of other social media networks and blogs. The search will reveal the top users mentioning the key terms, the top hashtags used, and provide a ration as to whether the overall sentiment is positive, neutral, or negative.
If you run a small biz, SocialMention could be of real help to quickly see what everyone is saying about your brand in the social-sphere.
In closing
This list is far from exhaustive, but hopefully it provides some perspective on the different options available to operations of different scales. The range of services and tools, the depth and range of their reach, and the prices for access to them vary widely. In choosing between SMM solution for your business, balancing these elements is key to finding the right one.
