5 Best Social Media Monitoring Tools [SWOT Analysis]

What started as an opportunity to track social media chatter and carry out basic reporting, has created an entire social enterprise software eco-system. Social Media Monitoring is no longer a good to have feature but a must have feature in all the social enterprise platforms. This change in the industry has given rise to a gamut of social business functions in an enterprise: social marketing, social crm, social selling, social research, social hiring and so on.


Today in the market, there are multiple social media monitoring platforms with variety of benefits, functionalities and use-cases. But out of all, there are specific use-cases, which are of highest importance to an enterprise, which not all the platforms have. Hence, many enterprises spend in various tools to carry out their operations. Most of these decisions are driven by cost and usability factor. With ever increasing social networking sites, it is a challenge for all the social media monitoring vendors to track all the conversations from new emerging sites. In addition to this, the growing interest towards data policy and privacy are also making it difficult for social media monitoring platforms to track all the data. This was not the case few years back, but now it’s extremely difficult for application developers to access public data. They have to either be limited to few data samples or have to partner with global data vendors.

For this article, we are taking 5 popular tools in the industry which are making news with their associations and market reach. They are :

1. Sysomos
2. Salesforce
3. Simplify360
4. Brand Watch
5. Lithium

Before we get into the analysis of these tools we need to understand what are the most important use cases of social media monitoring platforms. Most enterprises today use social media for marketing and customer service. These two are the core applications of social media compared to any other use case present out there.

Inorder to cater to the marketing and customer service department of an enterprises, following are the most important features that needs to be present:

1. Ability to monitor social web
2. Ability to segment social media chatter automatically
3. Ability to create custom dashboards
4. Strong rule engine creation
5. In-depth social media analytics
6. Complete CRM functionalities
7. Ability to create knowledge repository for customer service
8. Lead/Case Management ability
9. Engagement and Publishing Units
10. Enterprise Integration

The above features are the most important ones that need to be included in the platform. All the five platforms mentioned above are the leaders in the industry, which has all these features to different levels in their advancement, and though every one will say that they have the features, enterprises need to look at its complete road map to make any investment.

SN	Features	Sysomos	Salesforce	Simplify360	Brandwatch	Lithium
1	Ability to monitor social web	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
2	Ability to segment social media chatter automatically	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
3	Ability to create custom dashboards	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
4	Strong rule engine creation	N/A	Advanced	Advanced	N/A	Advanced
5	In-depth social media analytics	Medium	Medium	Advanced	Medium	Medium
6	Complete CRM functionalities	Medium	Advanced	Advanced	Medium	Advanced
7	Ability to create a knowledge repository for customer service	N/A	N/A	Yes	N/A	Yes
8	Lead/Case Management ability	Basic	Advanced	Advanced	Basic	Medium
9	Engagement and Publishing Units	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
10	Enterprise Integration	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Feature Analysis

Monitoring

Most of these tools have a strong ability to monitor keywords using different logic combination and search pattern. The only difference that exists is in the source which all these tools monitor; some will have few sources while others reach out to millions of sources. Among these tools, Simplify360 has a unqiue ability to monitor even custom list of facebook pages, twitter channels, linkedin groups, google plus and youtube channel. This feature is interesting because it allows enterprise to create their own custom list of important channels.

In terms of languages most of the above tools has the ability to track multiple languages.

Publishing and Engagement

All the tools have similar strength in terms of basic publishing and engagement console. This will allow enterprises to easily manage their social media marketing.


Social Media Dashboards

All the tools have a standard social media monitoring dashboards with ability to export data and graphs/charts. But not all the tools have ability to create custom dashboards with respect to their needs. In addition to this, most tools have different ways to displaying dashboards. It is either static dashboards, widget based or customizable based. But there are not strong indicators of anyone winning in this category.

Social Media Analytics

Among all these tools, only Simplify360 has a dedicated channel analytics reports for facebook pages, twitter profiles and linkedin groups. Other have integrated facebook and twitter reports. But not all have dedicated channel reports. In this particular category there are other independent players like unmetrics, social bakers and sprout social. But in terms of keywords based social web monitoring capability they are not strong.

Social CRM

This is the most important function required in social media monitoring platform. Sysomos and Brandwatch only have a basic task assignment and follow up features. But Salesforce, Lithium and Simplify360 have much advanced features like work flow automation, rules engines to segment messages and case management. In addition to this features, only Lithium and Simplify360 has the facility for admins to create complete knowledge repository so that customer agents can access FAQs at the as when they are responding to messages.

Integration

Out of all the tools Salesforce has a very strong reach to enterprise eco-system making them the giants in the enterprise software. Thereforce, they obviously have a strong connection to other platforms. Even then Simplify360 and Lithium do show strong ability to connect to any enterprise platform through their open API framework. In this terms there aren’t much cases of brandwatch and sysomos, which are basically used as a standalone software platforms.

	Sysomos	Salesforce	Simplify360	Brandwatch	Lithium
Weakness	Mostly targeted only for PR purpose.	Rather than a standalone system, it’s a collection of multiple platforms making it difficult for users to use.	Doesn’t have much features in social campaign management compared to Lithium/Salesforce.	Mostly targeted for only Research department.	Has a very weak social media monitoring capability compared to others.
Strength	Good dashboard capability.	Strong access to enterprise eco-system.	Strong CRM features and completely integrated tools.	Better ability for analyst to filter data.	Better reach to customer experience department.

Based on the requirement of an enterprise, most companies prefer different social media monitoring tools. Some of the important reasons for decision processes are:

1. Number of sources being captured.
2. Business model of the platforms
3. Existing relationship with other enterprise platforms
4. Local support teams
5. Urgency in the enterprise for implementing social monitoring tools.

Most enterprises are still using free tools to track mentions and respond using Twitter or Facebook page. Moreover, most are still satisfied with free or low paid tools for managing their social media management.

But most enterprises have implemented social media much deeper into their business process making it difficult for them to use free or low paid tools. Industries like Telecom, Airlines, Banking and Retail have a much matured enterprise tool adoption hence they require more customization and support ability. This has made them prefer more enterprise friendly tools like Salesforce and Simplify360. In addition to this, their strong partnership with BPO centers and software integrators make them highly competitive compared to other tools.

Through SMBs are still comfortable with paying less and using low feature tools, in the larger enterprise market we are seeing revolution in terms of adoption of social enterprise platforms.

Disclosure: I'm a former employee of Simplify360.
Image credit: tedxvienna.at