ALTERNATIVE TOOLS TO SIMPLIFY YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Google Alerts:
Google Alerts is free, easy to use and an efficient method to stay up-to-date of news or learn what people are saying about you or your brand. It is a free service that sends users an email or RSS alert, when the search engine indicates new material associated to exact keyword expression. Many businesspersons are using this service to supervise their company's reputation online. Students can also use it to monitor their personal brand reputation online.
Few handy uses of Google Alerts are:
(i) Monitoring a developing news story.
(ii) Keeping current on a competitor or industry.
(iii) Getting the latest on a celebrity or event.
(iv) Keeping checks on your topics of interests.
(v) Monitor your name/domain name.
(vi) Monitor keywords.
Google Alerts is tremendously easy to set up and use. You can set up several alerts in a matter a seconds. All you need to do is verify your email address with Google and this simple reputation management tool is ready to go in an instant.
You can set up Google Alerts to send you links to the pages it detects related to your query either once a day or once a week, and if there isn’t any new information, you won't get an alert at all. However if you use the RSS feature, you will get instant notifications as and when the new data is discovered. Because the RSS feeds track information as it occurs, allowing you to be much more active. And also, with feeds you can manage your feed reader the way you like, without having to worry about several emails (if you have several alerts established).
Google alerts help, guides you in setting-up the alert by showing you how to compose a good search in order to receive pertinent alerts. You can also use advance option section, whilst creating the alert. By selecting advance option, you can choose a delivery rate, specific source, set the volume, deliver to RSS feed and you can also manage your alerts page.
All in all, it is a decent and simple way to monitor your personal brand and it helps you to simplify your work to a great extent.
Price: Free.
Sprout Social:
Sprout Social is a social media management tool designed to help businesses find new customers and enhance their social media presence. This application incorporates facebook, twitter, linkedIn and other networks where consumers are continually engaging with brands and companies.
Sprout Social is an integral social media management tool that coalesces the abilities of:
(i) Analytics: It shows impressions, engagement, shares and the demographics of your followers and influencers, which allows you to:
(a) Gauge which posts are the most influential.
(b) Modify your message to your most eminent demographic.
(c) Know where to lift ad spend on social media platforms that aren’t warranting the engagement you’re looking to attain.
(ii) Social Feed Aggregation: The capability to see your Twitter feed, Facebook newsfeed and RSS feed reader integration on one screen. This abridges your efforts by having all of your social media updates fed into one site.
(iii) Social Media Publishing: It also allows you to post directly on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles from the Sprout Social dashboard.
(iv) Team Management: You can manage your team members and review posts before they’re pushed to your sites.
Sprout Social offers a FREE 30-day trial for novices, which can be used to understand the system. When you sign in initially, it will take you through a sequence of steps to add in your social media accounts. Then it will analyze your online state and populate your Dashboard accordingly.
The main page of your dashboard will reflect a summary of your online presence at the top left, with a screenshot of what you’ve been doing online. It’s an interesting way to have an overview before you choose to create any posts. From here, you can visit your available tabs; located at the top navigation; or, you may also scroll down to see snapshots of your associated accounts. Sprout Social offers a quick score (for Facebook and Twitter) that shows how well you’re communicating with your audience. The higher your score numbers are, the more valuable your audience is to your business.
The Messages tab performs an outstanding job of combining new messages you’ve posted, comments by others and interactions from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn on one feed and also, making your recent post interactions visible on multiple platforms. You can view your sent messages from specific days or by week and month in a single tab.
Just like Hootsuite, Sprout Social also lets its users to publish posts via the social media dashboard. This eliminates visiting individual social media platforms and posting directly.
Price:
Standard
$39/Month
Manage up to 10 profiles
(Recommended for smaller companies, teams and agencies)
All-In-One Social Inbox
Real-time Brand Monitoring
Advanced Publishing Features
Social CRM Tools
Comprehensive Reporting Tools
Complimentary Training & Support
$59/Month
Manage up to 20 Profiles
(Recommended for growing companies, teams and agencies)
All Standard Plan Features
Complete Publishing & Engagement
Helpdesk Integration
Deluxe Reporting Package
Google Analytics Integration
Complimentary Training & Support
Manage up to 50 Profiles
(Recommended for larger companies, teams and agencies)
All Standard & Deluxe Features
Social Care Suite
ViralPost™ Send Time Optimization
Premium Reporting Package
Custom Branded Interface
Complimentary Training & Support
Mention is an application to monitor the web mentions of your brand, company, industry, or even your competitors. You'll be informed in real-time about any mentions that happen on the web or on social networks. This smart application learns over time what mentions can be disregarded as junk and which are appropriate. This helps in saving your time as you use the application and don't have to manually sieve through the mentions each and every time. Additionally, you can utilize this application with others and even allocate certain tasks to other team members. You can also program the application to react to mentions in an intelligent way including retweeting certain mentions or sharing positive mentions on Facebook. This application allows you to create alerts in different languages, you can also select the sources you want to send to or add to your mention view.
To register for Mention, you can click on the "Sign In" link placed in the homepage's upper right-hand corner. You will need to provide your full name, email address, password and accept the site's terms of use and privacy policy. You can also sign up using your Twitter, Facebook, Twitter or Google ID login.
Price:
Free Plan: 3 alerts, 500 mentions per month and 1 month history.
Pro Plan ($19.99/month): Unlimited alerts, 50,000 mentions per month, unlimited history, access to statistics and data export tools.
Team Plan ($99.95/month): Unlimited alerts, 50,000 mentions per month, unlimited history, access to statistics, multi users activation and data export tools.
Social Mention:
Social Mention is free, real-time social media search and analysis. Social Mention monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Google etc. You can search or opt to receive social media alerts (similar to Google Alerts but for social media only.) You can choose to receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, marketing campaign, competitor, or on a developing news story, or the latest gossip on a celebrity/sports team/music band. SocialMention can be used to trace mentions through the board or you can select to explore precisely for keywords identified in video/audio media, blogs/micro blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, and Q&A format.
To understand SocialMention better, you need to understand it’s tools like:
(i) Sentiment: It indicates if mentions are positive, negative, or neutral. This is not totally scientific data, but it gives a nice general view at how your company or search query is being talked about in social media.
(ii) Strength: The probability that your brand is being talked about in social media.
Calculating strength: Phrase mentions within the last 24 hours divided by total possible mentions.
(iii) Passion: It is the measure of the probability that people talking about your brand will do so recurrently. The more the people talk about you or your brand, the higher will be your passion score.
(iv) Reach: It is a measure of the range of influence. It is the number of unique authors referencing your brand divided by the total number of mentions.
Price: Free.
ViralHeat:
ViralHeat is a profile based social media monitoring tool that focuses on assisting you develop and implement a successful marketing campaign by monitoring social media services like Twitter and Facebook to determine the key influencers and other networkers who are involved in conversations about your brand. ViralHeat gives you the ability to filter through uninvited mentions to get to the meat; the analytical data aids your social media optimization. ViralHeat also has an extraordinary location collection tool that permits you to enter the definite location to pull data from and select a range around that specified neighborhood/location.
Price:
Personal (Free plan): Suitable for managing your personal social media accounts.
Pro ($9.99/Month): It offers complete Social Media Management with Advanced Publishing and Analytics.
Premium ($99.99/Month): It comes with Integrated Social Marketing Suite with Monitoring, Management, Publishing, and Analytics.
Trackur:
Trackur is another online reputation and social media monitoring tool intended to help you in tracking what is said about you or your brand on the internet. Trackur scans several web pages–including news, blogs, video, images, and forums to inform you, if it notices anything that corresponds with the keywords of your interest. However, Trackur comes with a few interesting features, such as:
(i) Executive Insights: Swiftly see the number of new results, velocity change, share of voice.
(ii) Data your way: Trackur’s intuitive dashboard data is available for easy Excel export, or you may also get results on the fly with the RSS/XML feeds in email alerts.
(iii)Clarity in results: Every conversation is archived, complete with resources for viewing the original article, sharing with co-workers, or bookmarking for follow-up.
(iv) White Label Branding: Trackur allows you to use your own logo, your colors/fonts along with Trackur’s URL
(v) Influencer Analysis: Trackur’s proprietary InfluenceRank dashboards doesn’t just let you see the conversation about you or your brand, but also permits you to see who is behind the conversation.
(vi) Sentiment Analysis: With automated Sentiment Analysis, Users can discover whether the results are positive, negative or neutral.
(vii) Custom feeds: This feature lets you to monitor a particular site/Forum/Blog closely. With custom feeds, users can upload and monitor the RSS feed of any site. (Premium and Ultimate Users)
(viii) Group by Profiles: With profiles, users can segment their dashboard results based on specific keywords or maybe specific client. Users can also use profiles to provide logins for different people in a company. (Premium and Ultimate Users)
(ix) CrisisShield Insurance: Free reputation insurance to help user to repair reputation in crisis. It also gives social media, Google and Legal advices without any extra charge. (Premium and Ultimate users)
(x) Unlimited Client Logins: Users can assign logins for their clients or employees. The main user gets to manage the overall account, letting the client or employee to see whatever is needed or appropriate only. (Ultimate Users)
(xi) Full White Labeling: Users can use their own URL, Logo, Font or Color Scheme, without having to mention anything about Trackur to your customers. (Ultimate Users)
Price:
Basic ($27/Month): Recommended for individual use. This pack allows the user to save 5 searches, full media monitoring and also, influence & sentiment analysis, and offers Standard support.
Plus ($97/Month): Recommended for small business organizations. This pack comes with all Basic plan features, however allows the user to save 50 searches.
Premium ($197/Month): Recommended for large companies. Comes with all Plus plan features. But allows the user to save 250 searches and also offers enhanced support. In addition, Premium User gets custom feeds, CrisisShield Insurance, Enhanced support and Group by profile features.
Ultimate ($447/Month): Recommended for agencies. This package comes will all Premium plan features. However, allows the user to save unlimited searches. In addition, Ultimate User gets Unlimited Client Logins and Full White labeling.
Trackur also offers 10-Day Free Trial on All Plans!
Radian 6:
Radian6 is a monitoring tool. It helps in monitoring brand mentions across the social landscape and its Unique Engagement Console offers an end-to-end presence management tool. Radian6 offers its users complete coverage of discussions on the social web, covers innumerable blogs, comments, the public Facebook Application Programming Interface and the full Twitter firehose (Massive, real-time stream of Tweets that flow from Twitter each day.) Using Radian6, Users begin with monitoring a simple keyword or phrase and end up with a cascade of knowledge that they can drill down into, taking armloads of intensive information with them. Radian6 is very influential, as it provides complex pieces of data that users can analyze. It also allows users to customize their filtering penchants by region, language, media type etc. and collects data accordingly. It works in real time and starts to formulate data set instantly. From this data set, users can use several widgets that allow them to have an overview of all the information or even drilling it to the minutest details. Some of the widgets include:
(i) River of News:Every post mentioning specific keywords gathered from social media services reflects in the River of News in real time. From here, users can choose to get into specific areas of information by sorting all posts within the River of News by Comment Count, Twitter Followers, Engagement and more.
(ii) Conversation Cloud: This is a fantastic visual, as it allows users to see the top 50 mentioned words surrounding their product or brand. This monitoring widget delivers dynamic but easy-to-understand results.
(iii) Topic Trend Monitor: This widget is a flawless tool for a social media campaign, as it allows users to see the mention lows and highs of their keyword. The Spark Chart enables users to see how their keyword has trended over a specific time period. If there is a drop or a rise on the chart, users can click on it and a Conversation Cloud or River of News (User’s choice) will appear, and can see the exact posts from that day.
(iv) Topic Analysis: The Topic Analysis is a pie chart, which lets one to drill down to find the specifics of the specifics. Users can fragment this pie chart according to sentiment, language, media time, engagement level and region.
Using Radian6, one can easily export all the collected data from the River of News, Conversation Cloud, Topic Trend Monitor and Topic Analysis into HTML, XML, PDF and CSV formats. Users can also setup email alerts, to get email notification as soon as User’s name/brand is mentioned in the social media kingdom.
Price:
Prices for Radian6 depends upon the contract period and varies from agency to brand.
Agency pricing, 30-day commitment:
$950/month: 1 million mentions, 500 users.
Brands, 1-year commitment:
$600/month: 1 topic profile, 10,000 mentions
$1,800/month: 4 topic profiles, 100,000 mentions
$4,100/month: 10 topic profiles, 250,000 mentions
$10,000/month: 20 topic profiles, 2.5 million mentions
Sysomos:
Sysomos is based on a simple concept of Who, what, when, where and why and demonstrates how vital it actually is for social media monitoring.
WHO: Who are your customers (age, income, occupation, interests etc.)?
In order to run a successful social media campaign, you should know your target market. You also should know who your key influencers are. Sysomos tracks these influencers and allows you to listen to appropriate conversations happening around the globe through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other video channels, blogs, forums and traditional news outlets.
WHAT: What are people saying about your company, brand and employees? Are they dissatisfied or satisfied? You should know what people are saying, whether it is positive, negative, or neutral. Sysomos monitors these web conversations, finds the common trends for you.
WHEN: You can see exactly when conversations are occurring and what prompted the discussion and compare those chats historically and in real time.
WHERE: Sysomos offers geo-demographic information feature, to let you know exactly where the conversations are happening, down to the specific country or city, and learn how you can better target specific areas.
WHY: With sentiment analysis, all of the conversations that mention your product or brand – whether positive, negative, neutral are seized through social media monitoring and are mechanically assessed and sifted accordingly. Sentiment analysis is a strong monitoring feature that helps you see your business, product or service through the eyes of your customers.
Sysomos also offers Facebook Page Central – a tool that many small businesses are demanding for. This tool enables you to:
(a) Manage your fan page: You can receive email alerts within your social media monitoring dashboard when a new post or comment is made about you or your brand. You can moderate your comments, right from the dashboard. Facebook Page Central also removes unwanted posts that may make it to your page.
(b) Create sentiment and analysis reports: You can generate detailed reports with data on sentiment analysis, key influence identification, number of posts/comments and overall level of engagement for your employees or clients.
(c) Manage workflow for collaboration: With workflow management tools, you can assign your team members to reply to negative or positive messages, post events or highlights and manage the overall efficiency of your fan page.
Sysomos follows a four steps social-media monitoring process:
(i) Data Collection: The collected data is filtered for spam and gives you "pure" data.
(ii) Information Processing: Data is collected from around the globe, Sysomos translates the conversations and mentions for insights and intelligence.
(iii) Data Analysis: Data is analyzed and calculated according to demographics, sentiment, key influencer and buzz volume.
(iv) You: It all comes back to you and your business' success. The gathered information is now in your control. Charts and graphs provide visual confirmation of your social media campaign's process.
Sysomos further offers two different types of tools – MAP and Heartbeat.
MAP is an analytics-focused tool that allows for users to access up to one year of archived data. Whereas Heartbeat, only includes 30 days of search data with the option to upgrade to one year’s worth. Sysomos Heartbeat is a workflow tool, letting users to reply to mentions through different social networks or assign tasks for follow-up. These both features are not available in Sysomos MAP. But, MAP does allow for ad-hoc search queries, which can be helpful when agencies are researching a prospective client. MAP also offers Google Plus integration; Heartbeat does not.
Price: Sysomos prices are different, based on MAP and Heartbeat tools.
Sysomos MAP costs $2,750/Month. For $3,000/month, one can access nearly all the same features in addition to workflow management with Visible Technologies. Considering both require a one year contract, the price difference is small enough to warrant splurging for the higher priced tool.
Sysomos Heartbeat is less costly and it is not intended for managing multiple clients. The starting plan is $550 per month with a $500 setup fee. This plan includes five search queries with a total of ten tags and unlimited results. The next plan up is $1,100 per month which includes with ten queries, twenty-five tags and twenty-five users.
Which one Is best for your business?
Without a clear strategy in place, it may feel like comparing Apples with Oranges. Each tool has its merits and demerits and the tool you select will depend on precisely what you want to use it for? Where, Who, When do you want to monitor? How would you like to do the reporting? Ease of use. Support availability, operational considerations. All in all, it completely depends upon the budget, nature of business, size of organization and requirement of business. I’d recommend that before investing into any of these social media monitoring tools, one should opt for free versions and free trials of these tools to make a wise and informed decision.
Cost of these tools can depend upon the needs and requirements of the business or company. However, there are higher labor costs involved as well in order to get the desired results out of these tools. So before you decide to use any of these tools, make sure you have enough (Human and Monetary) resources. Don’t forget to consider the skills and availability of staff that will have a role to play. It’s probably worth allocating a separate budget for social media monitoring training.
Sources:
"Radian6 Review: Great for Brands, Not for Agencies." DragonSearch Internet Marketing Services Consultants.
http://goo.gl/2ybyQ
Top Ten Reviews, Sysomos.
http://goo.gl/PSgTi
"Be in the Know, Anywhere, Anytime." Mention.
https://en.mention.net/
"Sysomos MAP & Heartbeat: 2 Social Media Monitoring Tools, 1 Company."DragonSearch Internet Marketing Services Consultants.
http://goo.gl/s4wqx
"Real Time Search - Social Mention." Real Time Search - Social Mention.
http://socialmention.com/
“ViralHeat” Social Media Simplified. A unified suite for social media marketing.
https://www.viralheat.com/
"Accurate Social Media Monitoring Tools & Measurement Software | Trackur." Trackur.
http://goo.gl/MZO0
"Google Alerts - Monitor the Web for Interesting New Content." Google Alerts - Monitor the Web for Interesting New Content.
http://goo.gl/Xq0Tt
"Engage Your Audience & Care for Your Customers." Social Media Engagement Tools.
http://goo.gl/rJtKB
"Centresource Interactive Agency." Centresource Blog Social Media Monitoring Tools
by Larissa Sylvester on Feb 18, 2013
http://goo.gl/Qmxwq
"Francis Moran & Associates — We Bring Technology to Market." The Free Tools in My Social Media Marketing Toolkit — Part 2: Management & Measurement. By Alexandra Reid
http://goo.gl/eeMNi
"Social Media Manager for Hire." Surigao Digital Services Affordable Website Design and Development Social Media Manager for Hire Comments
http://goo.gl/Nbcso
