How to pick the *right* social media monitoring tool for you

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I’ve been working for a few weeks now and one of my tasks was to find a social media monitoring tool that we can use to monitor online activity for our clients. Easy peasy, right? Yah, I wish. It’s not as easy peasy as I would have liked it to be. It doesn’t start with picking a tool that has pretty colours and ends with actually understanding what it does, although that is of course part of it. Over the last few weeks I’ve spent countless hours on demos, trials and on the phone to account representatives.

To be totally honest, I was pretty clueless in the beginning. I mean lets face it, most people are when it comes to social media monitoring and even after all of those hours I only understand a fraction of this side of social media. And you can imagine how frustrating that is for someone who’d like to know it all but never really does. So, before boring you to sleep, here’s a short guide on how to choose a social media monitoring tool. For dummies. Like me.

What do you need to achieve with the tool? What questions are you trying to answer?

If you are at this stage, trust me, you are a long way from typing “social media monitoring tool” into Google. I mean, yes you can of course, but it’s not going to get you anywhere because every single tool is different. Every tool does something different. Some of them do it all. Some of them do a fraction of what you need them to do. So what are the questions you need the tool to answer?

• What are people saying about me and my product/service online?
• Where do they say it?
• Who says it?
• How do I measure up to the competition?
• How do people talk about my industry and who influences who?
• …

There’s an endless amount of questions you can ask. The question is, are those the questions you should be asking to get the results you truly need? So before you rush things, take a step back, do some brainstorming, start a list, narrow down the list.. You see where I’m going with this, don’t you? In short, make sure you know what you want from a tool.

What types of information do you need?

This one goes hand in hand with the first one and yet I thought it may be worth pointing out because not every tool will allow you to narrow down your results by country, language, demographics, etc. Another question you need to answer is how specific you need to be. Region? State? Country? Continent? Do you want to know if the writer of the content is male or female? Sentiment? Do you need to know whether the result is positive or negative? For sure helpful. Do however note that measuring sentiment is very difficult and the results are not always accurate which leads me to the next point. Do you want to be able to change the sentiment, influencing the results in the long-term?

Who will be responsible for the monitoring? How will you handle the monitoring?

I’ve tested a lot of tools and some are more difficult to use than others. This is an important question to be asking yourself because if you have someone do the monitoring who doesn’t know a lot about search or is generally not very computer savvy (you never know!) you need a tool that is easy to use. And some of them aren’t even though their account representatives like to say otherwise.

Additionally, you need to find out how easy it is to assign someone to a mention within the tool, how easy/difficult it is to pull a report, and how much control you have over queries and tags. Do you even want the control? (Note: The more control you have over the tool the less trouble you are going to have when you need to change something quickly!)

Price. Price. AND Price.

You wouldn’t think that this is an issue but boy oh boy some of those tools are expensive. Sometimes you’ll ask yourself how they even justify such an enormous price. Pricing models are usually different from tool to tool. Some depend on volume. Some on logins. Some on queries. Some on clients. It really does make your head swirl but it’s important to know that you don’t always need to pay for a Ferrari when you can get similar results with a Cadillac. (I’m not even sure if that’s an appropriate comparison as I know F all about cars but it proves the point.)

At the end of the day, choosing the right social media monitoring tool is equal to asking and answering a whole lot of questions. Once you have answered all of those question you can start looking at monitoring tools. What I’ve done and found extremely useful along the way is to start a chart. After each demo I’d fill it in, including details about price, how easy it is to use, the functionalities of each tool, etc, etc.

I’m not saying this approach is helpful for everyone, but what it does do is give you a nice overview at the end when it actually comes down to deciding on a tool. Tip: Always ask for demos & trials. Do NOT sign anything before you haven’t worked with the tool for a little bit. That would just be foolish. You need to understand how the tool works, what it does and most importantly if you can work with it. I’ve tested a couple of tools that did exactly what I wanted them to do but they were too complex and not nice to work with.

It’s important to understand that you’ll be using your monitoring tool every day and if you don’t like it, it will make the whole process painful. Very painful. Also, there’s no shame in asking for training to make sure you are using all the features in the best possible way.

So, that’s basically how I chose a tool for our company. What about you? What do you pay attention to? Leave your thoughts/ideas in the comments. I LOVE reading them. If you have questions, please post them in the comments too. I’ll try my best to answer them.

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