Choosing the right Social Media Monitoring tool for Market Research

There are currently over 1,000 social media monitoring tools on the market, so no wonder buyers find it hard to make an educated choice. To make things more complicated, there are numerous use cases, and even more possible buyers for social listening within a large organisation. Any organisation that wants to use social listening & analytics would ideally like a one-stop-shop for all its users: for starters Public Relations, then Customer Service, let’s not forget Operations and New Product Development; what about Digital Marketing, Advertising, and the one close to our hearts; Customer Insights otherwise known as Market Research.

If you are in market research or consumer insights and wondering which social media monitoring tool to use, read about the top 7 social media research companies in the October 2017 edition of Quirk’s magazine. One of them is DigitalMR’s listening247. 

In the same month DigitalMR was ranked by CIO Europe as one of the top 25 Artificial Intelligence Providers.

These rankings by pundits are helpful, but can one trust them? The Germans have a saying that goes “trust is good but checking is better”. The good news is that there is a way to check, and that is by asking your shortlisted vendors the 20 questions that can be found in this infographic.

If a social analytics solution for market research does not offer all of the following features you should probably walk away and look for one that does:

1. A clear and easy way to get rid of all the irrelevant posts – 80% of the data you harvest could be noise
2. Sentiment analysis in any language with the same accuracy – at least over 75%
3. Semantic analysis in any language with the same accuracy – at least over 80%
4. The ability to break down sentiment into specific emotions
5. Image analysis for logo recognition and theme detection
6. A clear process on how to integrate insights from social media listening with surveys and customer behaviour tracking

If you happen to be a customer insights practitioner and you are unhappy with the choice of social media monitoring tool your digital marketing department is using, because it does not seem to be addressing your own use cases, you have three options:

1. Accept that you will not be able to use social media listening to discover actionable insights – your organisation will not be able to compete on the marketing place in the long run and you will probably be fired
2. Argue a case to replace the tool that your colleagues in Digital are using with one that covers both your needs and theirs – this battle is very difficult to win because of the cost of switch as well as the “not invented here syndrome”
3. Argue a case that your organisation needs an additional kind of a social listening tool with higher accuracy that will complement the one already in use by Digital – most likely scenario to succeed, especially if the tool used by digital marketing can be used for post harvesting and the social media research company will be happy to clean and analyse the data harvested by another tool

Watch this space in the next 2 years; there will be exponential growth of social analytics in market research that will catch many insights practitioners by surprise. Don’t be one of them!