There’s a short list of “must have” items that every brand needs to succeed, and the right social intelligence tools certainly dominate much of it these days.
Brands can make it one minute and break it the next with social media missteps. So, we compiled a list of the social intelligence tools that will help you navigate today’s tricky social media landscape.
About Social Intelligence Tools
With the speed that social media moves, the right social intelligence tools for your brand are all about preparedness. The tools you select should be chosen specifically to further your brand’s interest in three key areas:
- Staying in the know. It’s the root of success in both social media campaigns and crisis mitigation. Being caught unaware by a crisis or a trend can be all it takes to give your competition the edge. And it’s entirely unnecessary as there are so many tools to help you stay aware of important things.
- Baseline establishment. Your baseline metrics should be focused and updated regularly so you have the most accurate view of brand health and the ability to spot anomalies with precision.
- Crisis plan development. With an accurate baseline in place, your tool needs to provide robust monitoring and alert functionality in case things go south so you can put your crisis plan into action.
And without transparency and accuracy in your social intelligence tools, your results will simply not be as effective as possible. It doesn’t matter how pretty the interface is if your baseline metrics are dead wrong.
And that’s why we’ve built our NetBase Quid products using next generation artificial intelligence (AI). It’s machine learning, deep learning, expert systems and evolving AI rolled into one powerful social intelligence platform, so your brand awareness stays ahead of the social media tides. And it’s first in our list of top social intelligence tools for good reason!
The Top Social Intelligence Tools
NetBase Quid
There’s a reason that the suite of products in NetBase Quid are the unequivocal leader in consumer and market intelligence. It offers AI-driven social media analytics and visualized data with unrivalled accuracy and dependability that top brands trust to deliver actionable insight.
NetBase Quid gives a crystal-clear view into online insight by mining a robust assortment of sources, including (though not limited to) social media, business profiles, forums, blogs, news articles, patent applications, consumer reviews, voice of the customer, product reviews, and everything in between to ensure your analysis captures all relevant data.
Not only that, you can upload your own datasets to analyze for an holistic view of the consumer and your market. It offers maximum flexibility, enabling customers to analyze data that’s important to them, and options that they are always amazed to discover. The possibilities for extracting insight are truly endless in this social intelligence tool.
And once your data is analyzed, there are an abundance of use cases to apply them to. Industry leaders partner with NetBase Quid for emerging trend identification, brand health, crisis management, campaign tracking, influencer identification, white space innovation, competitive intelligence, customer care, product launches, innovation, event management and so much more.
Examine spikes and dips in the conversation surrounding your brand and establish your baseline with utmost confidence.
It’s transparency down to the granular level for a multitude of use cases and your social intelligence toolbox really shouldn’t be without it!
Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck makes the twitterverse manageable for businesses to run multiple Twitter accounts from one platform. It’s well suited for ease of content consumption by the ability to split the screen into multiple columns of content. Easily monitor content by creating lists including trending topics, mentions, collections, groups and more. This way, you can personalize the content you see which will make your Twitter use focused, helping you to stay out of those online rabbit holes.
It’s free and owned by Twitter. You can use it to have your personal, professional and business accounts in one place, eliminating the hassle of logging in and out of multiple accounts. And with the ability to monitor trends, schedule tweets and customize to your needs, it’s a winner for tweeting, for sure. You’ll need a more complete picture to inform your full social intelligence needs though.
IfThenThenThat (IFTTT)
IFTTT is a free service that allows you to connect internet capable devices, services and applications limited only by your imagination. The IFTTT website and mobile app help you to create ‘applets’ which facilitate a trigger and action response. (Don’t worry, you don’t need to know how to code anything.)
Think, “Alexa … make a cup of coffee.” It’s really that easy, once you spend a few minutes sorting it out. And the business and social media implications are huge. Running a window washing company? Automate alerts to your team when your weather app calls for rain. Or you could automate Facebook to send messages to clients on their birthdays … the sky’s the limit.
It’s a heavy dose of automation that can really take the load off on tasks that you do all the time, saving you time and money. It will seriously have you wanting to automate everything, so set a timer before you jump in! It’s a social intelligence assist!
Keyhole
The tools for measuring social media campaigns in Keyhole are pretty useful. With the ability to track campaign monitoring, influencer marketing, event monitoring and brand monitoring, Keyhole gives your marketing team the data it needs to analyze social media campaigns in real time. It also helps with data driven reports for your teams, clients and partners.
Keyhole offers a tiered subscription service, but they do offer a free trial so you can take a look around. It’s true social intelligence power is in its hashtag analytics capabilities.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite has been around for years and has a loyal following for good reason. The ability to connect all of your brand’s social media accounts in one platform is certainly a social intelligence tool worth looking into. With Hootsuite, you can broadcast your entire social media campaign from one place and track your performance too.
Not only that, the ability to schedule posts, monitor analytics, track your brand and set up collaborations with team members makes Hootsuite an invaluable asset in the social media landscape.
Buffer
Buffer, like Google, has become a verb in its own right for a reason. It’s super useful for social media campaign analysis and publishing to your different social media platforms. The content creation tools enable the user to tweak posts to look their best on each platform. It also monitors scheduling enabling the user to publish posts when they will receive maximum engagement.
Buffer has now been split into three separate social intelligence products, and the suite of tools are super useful for growing your brand’s audience.
- Publish – social media scheduling
- Reply – social media monitoring and messaging
- Analyze – social media analytics
Khoros
Khoros is a social media monitoring platform that offers customer oriented, enterprise-level software and services geared for brands looking to level up their social media consumer interaction and social intelligence savvy.
With Khoros you can plan an effective social media marketing strategy by analyzing which type of content is reverberating with your target audience, so you don’t waste time. And with Khoros’ community management and engagement tools you’ll never miss an opportunity to engage with your consumer base.
With the speed of social media, brands can’t afford to miss an opportunity – especially one that rights the ship during a crisis. Have your PR team take this one through its paces to see if it’s a good fit!
Mention
When planning your next social media campaign, Mention reaches over and turns the volume up. It shines in monitoring your specific area of focus by combing over 1 billion sources so you can build an informed, data driven campaign.
Not only that, this social intelligence tool can also help you keep tabs on the competition by monitoring your competitor’s share of voice, so you can stay out front. You can have reports set up to keep you up to date on brand performance and ‘pulse’ notifications sent if your mentions are getting hot.
Mention also offers publishing tools to help you message out those brand discoveries to your audience segments.
Domo
Domo is all about business intelligence through streamlined data integration. It is customized intelligence based on your brand’s data running on Domo’s cloud-based platform.
Once your data is uploaded to the cloud, it’s available to you and your teams via a stunning interface that puts this business intelligence at your fingertips. Brands with partners, teams and suppliers in multiple locations or time zones benefit from it, for sure.
Connect, manipulate and visualize your data and have it accessible for your people whenever they need it. Domo is business intelligence for modern brands moving fast. And combining it with a social intelligence tool is solid thinking.
Companion
Smart brands understand the need for rock solid influencer relationships in their marketing campaigns and Companion makes that relationship simple. You can even shop for a new one if you need to!
Companion is a robust influencer-centric platform that provides social intelligence metrics, focused on influencer content capture, internal and external reporting, influencer benchmarking and relationship management.
Whether your brand has an army of influencers or you’re looking for your first one, Companion offers influencer analytics to make sure you’re getting the maximum ROI. And you’ll have the reports to prove it!
Critical Mention
Where most brand tracking platforms leave off, Critical Mention casts a wider net by including TV and radio mentions to capture even more of your brand’s share of voice. Built for speed, searches in Critical Mention come back blazingly fast. And with a host of analytic tools, customizable reports and one-click sharing, you’ll have the data you need when you want it.
And for even deeper insight and functionality, Critical Mention offers a licensed content function that gives you access to premium and print-only content for maximum visibility. It offers access to paywalled content including industry and trade journals across a variety of verticals.
For brands that can benefit from the extended reach of Critical Mention, it’s certainly worth it for the added media coverage and data it provides.
Conclusion
There is no end to social analytic tools online that overpromise and underdeliver. With this list we hope to take some of the guesswork out of finding the ones that work well.
Ecommerce and social media are moving at breakneck speed; and savvy brand leaders know they can ill afford to waste time with a social intelligence tool that is either cumbersome, inaccurate or both. And that’s exactly why top brands choose NetBase Quid for their market intelligence.
The time invested in choosing quality social intelligence tools for your brand will pay dividends in accuracy and efficiency that simply cannot be overstated. Fine tune your social listening and you’ll be ahead of market trends in no time. Be sure to reach out for a personalized demo to learn more!
