Social Media Listening Tools

Social media listening tools can help make sense of an intimidating mass of tweets, photos, videos, posts and links. In general, the stuff of social media is fundamentally qualitative. Its authors include customers, potential customers, employees, applicants, and spambots, and it comes from sources like YouTube, Twitter, and blogs. Social media listening tools can be the best way for a business to make sense of it all. Businesses and marketeers can turn to a variety of social media listening tools that have proliferated over the past two years.

Social Media Listening Tools for Monitoring your Business

Needs vary from case to case, but there are established metrics that good social media listening tools will deliver or at least enable users to obtain without too much effort.

Social Media Volume

Volume: call it mentions, call it word of mouth, call it raw qualitative data—this is the bulk number of social media mentions a search term receives. It's the most easily quantifiable thing that comes out of social media listening.

Social Media Volume by Source

Volume by source: measuring volume from multiple sources can help determine the breadth of your social media presence and identify where to improve your social media campaign's efforts.

Social Media Trends

Trends: simple semantic parsing can let you know what people are talking about frequently in association with a search term.

Social Media Sentiment

Sentiment: you have volume, but is it good, bad, or irrelevant? Tools that offer sentiment analysis usually charge based on the complexity of that analysis. Finding a tool that allows you to track sentiment is important, but you may also want a tool that offers the ability to tag and categorize beyond the simple dichotomy of positive and negative.

Social Media Metrics you need may vary

If you have idle interns or few enough mentions to wade through, human analysis can be less expensive and more thorough then automated text analysis. Ultimately it depends on the size and nature of your business and deciding what you want to get out of having a social media presence (marketing? PR? customer acquisition/service? all of the above?). Knowing your brand and being practical about social media will help you determine what's best to measure and which social media listening tools provide the metrics to match your business needs.

About Looxii

Looxii, founded in 2009 is an Atlanta-based startup that makes social media simpler for businesses with its recently launched web-based listening platform.