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Roundup: Social Media Monitoring Tools

Doriano "Paisano" Carta — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:00:06 +0000

There are countless ways to track your brand on social media. Simple methods include using Twitter search and Google Alerts; more elaborate tools include Radian6‘s newly announced Engagement Console, which will scour numerous social platforms for any mention of your brand.

So here’s a roundup of some of the more popular tracking tools.

Monitoring Dashboards

Twazzup 2.0 beta (which Dawn wrote about last year) is a dashboard that gathers all the mentions of your brand on Twitter and presents them in an appealing and useful way.

Trackur is another powerful social media monitoring tool. It used to be premium-only, but a free basic plan was recently announced that allows you to monitor one keyword, which is sufficient for most small organizations and personal brands. One of the things I like is the way that you can export any search result to an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.

SocialMention (which Dawn also wrote about last year) is similar to Trackur in that it will search all over the web for any mention of your keyword/brand. I like how you can set up alerts that will be emailed to you with results summaries. It also lets you break down search results according to where your brand is mentioned: blog posts, images, videos, news items and more. You can even see every time someone has saved a link from your web site/blog to Delicious or shared it on StumbleUpon.

Addictomatic presents all mentions of your keyword or brand on one nicely designed page. You’ll see images from Flickr, videos from YouTube, posts shared on Digg and much more.

Twitter Clients

Some people find it sufficient to keep track of their brand or other keywords of interest via their day-to-day Twitter client, such as TweetDeck, Seesmic or HootSuite. They accomplish this by simply creating a new column in the client that displays any tweets mentioning that keyword. The nice thing about this method is that you can reply and respond to people mentioning your brand or product, which makes it a good customer service tool.

Larger organizations that need more than one person to monitor Twitter can use a Twitter clients geared for teams, such as CoTweet, which lets multiple people respond to tweets at the same time. The other useful thing about CoTweet is the way it lets you turn tweets into tasks or action items that can be assigned to different team members, much like helpdesk tickets.

There are also tools that do nothing but track multiple hashtags/keywords on Twitter, such as Twitterfall, TweetGrid and my personal favorite of this type, Monitter. While Monitter doesn’t provide nearly as many columns or choices as TweetGrid, it does sport a slick user interface and feels faster. I do like the fact that TweetGrid lets you share a URL with all of the search terms you’ve assembled.

What tools do you use for social media monitoring?

Photo by: VivaLibre574

What Is Taking a Sip From the Twitter Firehose Going to Cost?

Liz Gannes — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 02:15:14 +0000

Twitter on Monday gave seven real-time search and discovery companies ranging from “funded startups to part-time, one-man operations” access to 100 percent of its tweets. Twitter’s so-called “firehose” is a valuable asset; the company has made partners like Google, Microsoft and most recently Yahoo pay to use it in their own real-time search. The move is part of a new, yet-to-be-standardized initiative of metered access for people and companies that build on Twitter.

From what we can gather, the startups aren’t yet paying much if anything for what they’re calling a “commercial licensing agreement” to Twitter’s firehose. Which is fair — you can imagine that someone like Ellerdale wouldn’t really be in the same category of demands on Twitter’s infrastructure as someone like Google. What the deals represent is an effort towards formalization of Twitter’s developer community, which now operates more than 50,000 applications.

New Twitter communications head Sean Garrett told us that while Twitter isn’t disclosing the terms of the current partnerships, it plans to make them readily available in the future. As he put it:

“As the agreements standardize, we hope to make the terms well known so developers know if the firehose is right for their business. Additionally, for current partners, we would like to help them plan for the future (as licensing costs increase with their business’ maturity).”

Twitter had previously given firehose access to startups including Summize (which it later bought) and FriendFeed. Garrett today called those arrangements “a dalliance” that was “short-lived” when Twitter shifted focus to its core service in light of extreme growth. He said the new deals are, by contrast, “sustainable and scalable.”

The startups that were just given access are Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye, and Chainn Search. Previously they’d only had access to a limited rate of tweets — clearly a handicap when you’re trying to respond to search queries and track trends in real time. In blog posts and tweets (except for Chainn Search, which doesn’t appear to have a web presence yet), the companies said they were grateful for the integration. Kosmix, for one, said it’s not “ready to showcase or demo the integration just yet.”

CrowdEye’s Ken Moss had a more personal response, saying he was grateful Twitter delivered on relationships with developers after it had previously shown preferential treatment to paying companies.

Twitter isn’t formalizing these relationships out of the good of its heart; it’s gearing up for a major monetization effort and will clearly expect developers to contribute a tithing. It’s in the company’s best interest for its developers to grow the ecosystem and contribute back.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Monetizing the Social Web Isn’t One Size Fits All

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com

Monitoring Solutions for Social Media and Twitter

Dawn Foster — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:00:50 +0000

I’m a bit of a data nut, and I enjoy looking for new and interesting ways to find and visualize information. This is especially true for finding new ways to monitor the various conversations happening across social media web sites. There are new monitoring tools appearing every day, more than I could ever hope to have time to evaluate. I’ve written about monitoring solutions many times on this blog with posts about monitoring online conversations, monitoring dashboards, monitoring real-time information on Twitter, and more. I thought that it would be a good time for another post to highlight a few more tools for monitoring online conversations. I recently found Ken Burbary’s Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions, which has almost 100 social media monitoring tools listed, so I thought that I would evaluate a few of the solutions on his list to find a couple that provide interesting information. Most of the tools available do a pretty good job of finding the posts that match your search terms, so I focused on a couple of the solutions that provide some additional value or analysis of the results.

We recently made a couple of announcements about an upcoming event called Ignite Portland, so I decided to use it as my test case for these monitoring solutions. It’s a good test case because we’ve been doing the event for a couple of years, so it has plenty of history and the recent announcement generated some buzz this week, but the volume is fairly manageable.

twazzup

This service is yet another Twitter monitoring solution. While twazzup shows the obvious information (tweets mentioning your search terms), it also has sections on the page for most popular links, contributors, a tag cloud and suggested users. I found the results to be very accurate and relevant, but it’s the little touches that make this site so interesting. You can mouse over avatars and links to get more relevant information. For example, if you mouse over a user link, it gives you a list of tweets about your topic from that user, along with number of followers, location, bio and other information, as well as a “follow” button in case you want to follow that user. If you mouse over a link, it shows you a list of users who posted the link to Twitter.

The downside is that the Twitter search results are currently limited to around nine days, so it is great for monitoring recent information, but it would not be a good solution for low-volume searches or for looking over longer periods of time. However, this is a limitation of Twitter itself, which services like this one have to live with.

Social Mention

Social Mention is a more comprehensive search that looks across blogs, Twitter, images, video, and more. Pay special attention to the links right above the search box on your results page. By default, searches return results from blogs, but you can also hit the links to return results from microblogs (Twitter, etc.), images, etc. Data junkies like me will probably want to select the “all” link. The best thing about Social Mention is all of the analysis that it provides about the data. You can see sentiment (positive, neutral, negative), top keywords, top users, top hashtags and more. Even better than just being able to see the information on the web site is that they give you several cuts of the data as CSV download files that you can save for later.

The biggest downside to Social Mention is that it still has a few issues to iron out with how some search engines handle special operators, like “OR”. While my OR search worked fine in certain parts of the site, it resulted in a large number of false positives in other areas. If you spend a few minutes tweaking your search and are careful not to use any complex searches, you should be able to work around these types of issues. It also appears have the same Twitter limitations as twazzup, and I noticed some other intermittent flakiness, but was willing to live with it, since the results were so interesting.

What are your favorite monitoring solutions?

Photo credit: stock.xcnhg user hamma

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