Companies planning and executing a social listening strategies must familiarize themselves with the core platform features and functionalities available for tracking brand conversations and deriving actionable intelligence.
Leading monitoring tools in the market today provide an expansive set of capabilities leveraging cutting-edge AI and ML technologies to ingest billions of daily public social conversations and distill signals from noise.
Before profiling 11 leading platforms, buyers should understand the breadth of core monitoring features in order to match potential solutions to intelligence objectives and requirements. Primary capabilities include:
Sentiment Analysis
Real-time and historical tracking of percentage breakdown across positive, negative and neutral sentiment mentions. Critical for identifying brand advocates vs detractors.
Volume Tracking
Monitoring daily, weekly or monthly volume measurements for target keywords and groups. Helps identify trends and outlier spikes/drops.
Reach/Impressions
Tally the potential views or impressions of conversations based on author follower counts and engagement. Signals content amplification power.
Share of Voice
Compare your brand’s mentions and reach to competitor brands within your broader industry/category. Indicates category dominance.
Influencer Identification
Discover authors driving conversations related to your market based on reach and engagement metrics. Identifies partnership/advocacy opportunities.
Historical Mention Archive
Lookup conversational archives related to your brand, products, executives etc dating back 1-2+ years. Critical for sentiment analysis trending.
Custom Alerting
Stay on top of trends by configuring real-time notifications around volume changes, new influencer mentions, priority topics and more based on boolean filters.
Conversation Clustering & Tagging
Around priority topics/keywords, group data points by themes to uncover insights and patterns in consumer conversations and concerns.
Audience Demographic Analysis
For authors and communities driving discussions about your brand, analyze associated psychographic and demographic traits based on social profile data
Competitive Benchmarking
Compare your performance side-by-side against competitor brands across dimensions like volume, sentiment, reach, share of voice and more.
CRM/Support Workflow Integrations
Sync monitoring data feeds into existing workflows and systems like CRM platforms, support desks and social publishing tools. Enables direct engagement capabilities.
Executive Reporting & Exports
Export easy-to-digest performance summaries, charts and tables to share monitoring program data across internal stakeholder groups and track project success.
Ongoing Capability Expansions
Choose partner brands who stay ahead of the technology curve and invest in ongoing R&D around machine learning and NLP to expand platform capabilities continuously.
While all enterprise-level social monitoring platforms share wide ranging capabilities, brands must examine the depth and sophistication of each solution’s feature set to determine optimal fits.
When compiling your shortlist of vendors, scrutinize how they stack up across 10+ core feature themes highlighted below.
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