Page 107 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

Monitoring Brands and Conversations

It’s no use running an SMM campaign if you can’t measure it. You should always
measure your SMM campaigns (see Chapter 25 for more detail on measurement).
Depending on the SMM campaign, different measurements may matter more than
others. The brand and conversation monitoring tools help you measure the suc-
cess of your SMM campaign and your ROI (return on investment). But they do a
lot more than that. These tools help you plan and design your SMM campaigns.
They give you a peek into actual user behavior on social platforms, telling you
what people are discussing, whether those conversations are positive or negative,
and where they’re taking place.

Any time you’re planning to launch an SMM campaign, you must begin by know-
ing what your target audiences are doing across the social web. These tools help
you do that. They can be classified into three groups:

» High-end tools and services that use linguistic analysis and deep data
mining to provide insights into the conversations, who is having them, and
where. These tools can cost anywhere from $5,000 a month to $50,000 a
month, based mostly on the number of topics mined and the frequency.
Included in this category are Sysomis, NetBase, and Crimson Hexagon (since
merged with Brandwatch).
» Low-end tools that primarily focus on the volume of the conversation over a
period of time and cover only positive and negative sentiment. Many of these
tools are free or dirt cheap. Included here are HootSuite and Social Mention.

» Middle-of-the-road tools that do some analysis but don’t always have the
breadth of sources or the depth of analysis that the high-end tools have. Tools
in this category are Salesforce Radian6 and Sysomos. Cision, through its Viral
Heat acquisition, is another player that straddles the high and low ends with
different service levels and capabilities.

When choosing which tool to use, keep the following factors in mind:

» Your audience: If you don’t know your audience and aren’t sure what their
motivations are, where they are participating, and how, you want one of the
high-end tools.
» The length of your SMM campaign: If you’re running a short campaign
targeting a small population of users, you probably don’t need to use one of
the high-end tools. It won’t be worth the money.

CHAPTER 4 Launching SMM Campaigns 91