Top Ten Paid Tools for Monitoring Social Media

Monitoring Social Media, as part of your overall marketing efforts, helps you, among other things, to measure the ROI (Return On Investment) of your social media campaigns, and determine which campaign was profitable and worth pursuing again in the future. In our previous post Top Ten Free Tools for Monitoring Social Media we introduced the top ten free tools that will help you with completing the task of monitoring social media. In addition to a number of free tools online, there are also a number of paid tools available to allow tracking and monitoring of social media in a variety of ways. All of them allow you to track social media efforts and tie results back to the goals of your business. Below we have listed the 1o most popular tools available now and overviews of each offering. Many offer free trials and many companies offer free demos and can be contacted directly for more information.

1. Radian6
Radian6 claims to scan over 100,000 million websites for buzz about brands. The sites scanned include mainstream news, blogs, videos, and social media, and the system works in real time, so that you can see who is talking about your brand and recognize who are the influential people in your industry. Radian6 offers comprehensive analytics and allows for deep filtering, social media metrics, and data segmentation in order to help make educated decisions.
Price: Radian6 starts at $500 per month, per profile for up to 10,000 new monthly results, and $100 per user ID.
Trail: Radiant6 offers Free trial following training session.

2. Alterian SM2 (formerly Techrigy SM2)
SM2 is a software solution designed for PR and marketing agencies to monitor and measure social media. SM2 helps to track conversations, review positive/negative sentiment for brands, clients, competitors and partners across social media channels such as blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, social networks, video/photo sharing sites and real-time alerts. SM2 combines a large proprietary data warehouse of online conversations with state of the art search, analysis and reporting tools. Reporting types include comparison charts and themed reports that make it easy to identify daily volume, demographics, location, and the tone and emotion of what is being said.
Price:N/A
Trail:SM2 offers a free account for one login, five search terms, and a limit of 1,000 results.

3. Biz360 Community
A media monitoring tool priced per user, per topic. The Topic Velocity tool on Biz360 provides users with information on rate of change of sentiment about a particular topic. The tool also produces data on conversation topics, tone and sentiment ratings, topic trending, competitive monitoring, topic/issue discovery, source identification, topic tagging, workflow and engagement, and alerting tools.
Price: $399/month, five topics cost $399 for one user license.
Trial: 15-day free trial.

4. Trackur
Trackur is a flexible and affordable social media monitoring tool, not unlike Radian 6. Trackur scans millions of web pages, including blogs, images, forums, etc. and notifies users of any keywords findings or related interest items. Trackur enables comprehensive social media monitoring and lets users receive custom alerts, track sentiment and trends, fine tune results with custom filters, gain valuable customer insights, and track sentiment and trends.
Price: Pricing starts at $18 per month for an individual user to $297 for an agency. All have unlimited results but a varying number of active searches, from five to unlimited.
Trial: Free 14-day trial permits one user and one search term and is easy to sign up for.

5. Nielsen Buzz Metrics
Nielsen BuzzMetrics offers brand and buzz monitoring through its suite of products including Brand Tracking which provides an audit of a brand’s online health, Audit which gives you a picture of a brand’s online health over a specific time period, Scorecard which shows how a brand stacks up against its competition, and Threat Tracker shows threats to online reputation. Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics services deliver trusted brand metrics, meaningful consumer insights and real-time market intelligence to help clients apply the power of consumer-generated media to their businesses.
Price: N/A. Contact company for pricing.
Trial: N/A

6. Sentiment Metrics
UK-based Sentiment Metrics has a reputation management tool that helps you monitor what is being said about a brand and your products across blogs, forums and news sites. Reports generated by using its software focus on sentiment, and whether an online mention is positive, negative, or neutral. SentimentMetrics locates and stores all the content about your brand, from millions of blogs, popular discussion boards, news and press release sites. SentimentMetrics then cleans and analyzes the data, presenting it in clear easy to read tables and graphs, for you to glean actionable business intelligence.
Price: £259 a month for single user accounts.
Trial: Free demo/trial.

7. Brandseye
Brands Eye tracks and monitors online mentions with multiple tracking tools and provides a real-time reputation score for both a brand and its competitors. Duplicate mentions are excluded by a filter created based on pre-determined data. BrandsEye generates a precise score that aims to reflect the state of a brand’s online reputation. BrandsEye has an algorithm that uses tagged data to output a single Reputation Score that can be tracked over time and graphed.
Price: Three packages: Blogger only costs $1 and runs five phrases twice a day, while Small Business cost $95 with 20 phrases that are updated every six hours, and lastly there is the Enterprise package which cost $350 and includes unlimited phrases updated every hour.
Trial: N/A

8. Scout Labs
“Social Media is the voice of the customer and everyone should have access to it,” according to ScoutLabs. Scout Labs is used for customer service, brand monitoring, competitive analysis, and crisis communications. Scout Labs customers use Scout Labs to know when to tune in to online conversations and what is most important to pay attention to. Also Scout Labs is a way to hear from customers, reach out to influential customers to build relationships, engage in proactive customer service, and let the voice of the customer inspire new product and marketing ideas.
Price: Starts at $199/month for the standard package with five searches up to the professional version with 25 searches for $749/month.
Trial: Yes, free 14-day trial.

9. ViralHeat
ViralHeat claims to go beyond showing raw mentions of a brand or keyword to deliver insights to clients so they can measure their social media campaigns without having to actively and manually monitor them. Viralheat is Twitter and Google Buzz enabled. With Viralheat, you can monitor your tweets, perform competitive analysis, discover new leads, and optimize marketing campaigns. Viralheat’s carefully designed real time web system allows you to discover blogs and websites that are actively shaping conversations about your campaign. Viralheat’s viral video offering spans 200 video sites worldwide and Viralheat’s influencer analytics allows organizations to discover which users truly shape the conversations for your campaign. Viralheat’s state of the art sentiment analysis cluster uses the most advanced technology to identify the mood of each and every mention.
Price: $9.99 to $89.99/ month.
Trial: Free 7-day trial

10. Webtrends
Webtrends’ Social Measurement breaks its offering into four stages: listen, engage, measure, decide. The tool allows users to monitor blogs and video sharing sites in real time for conversations pertinent to their brand. Workflow tools help users to delegate and supervise engagement opportunities uncovered. With its measurement tools you can analyze buzz about your company, products, issues, competitors to determine the outcomes of specific marketing campaigns, the content that is making an impact and key opinion-makers who influence your customers. The tools allow you to make better, more informed business decisions based on the insight you gain from social media.
Price: N/A
Trial: N/A

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Note about Optify
Although it has monitoring capabilities, Optify is not a monitoring tool, and therefore not on this list. Optify is a marketing optimization software suite that will help you optimize your online marketing and online presence. Using the monitoring tools listed above, you will know who’s talking about you, your product, or your industry, but to understand what needs to be done in order to take advantage of these mentioning, and then track and measure your results, you will need to use Optify. Try Optify for free – Sign Up for our free 30-day trial.

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We had room for only 10 paid tools. Share your thoughts, and let us know what paid tools you found to be most effective.