Which paid for social media monitoring tool(s) would others recommend?
Matt Navarra asks:
The web is littered with a whole range of free to use social media monitoring and measuring tools. You can achieve a lot with out paying for anything. However, if you were to advance to a paid for tool to measure and monitor online activity about your organisation and its areas of interest, which one(s) are best and why?
Truth is, I’m no expert and some of the experience I have of the heavyweight tools like Radian6 or Meltwater Buzz is a few years old now.
I know some Departments – such as the FCO – manage their accounts through Hootsuite, which offers an enterprise plan for multiple users (there’s a free trial too).
Update 5 April: Since the demise of CoTweet earlier this year, here’s a good post profiling seven free or low-cost alternatives to help you monitor and manage social media accounts.
Anyone want to contribute their suggestions and examples in the comments? Useful recommendations only, please, no pure sales pitches from vendors.
Everything
I think the question to ask is: what social media do you want to monitor, and why, and work out what tool works for you on the basis of the answer to that question. In my experience the free tools for Facebook and LinkedIn monitoring are patchy (although you could have a look at ThinkUp App for the former).
For Twitter I don’t think there is need – there are masses of free tools (Tweetdeck, Crowdbooster, SocialBro for example) that allow you to keep an eye on things easily and for free.