It’s not easy deciding which of the many social analytics tools out there is best for your brand. Sifting through consumer reviews is time consuming – so we’ve done a bit of the work for you. Here are the top ten reasons our customers shared for switching to NetBase from other brands.
1. Data Quality and Reporting Abilities
With so much riding on what customers are saying about your brand, you need high quality data for decision-making. Those making brand strategy decisions need easy access to this data as well. NetBase was identified as a leader in the Forrester Social Listening Platform Wave Report, Q3’2018. This is the industry report that is the standard in the Social Media Analytics industry.
NetBase also provides the ability to combine non-social customer data like surveys, focus groups, ratings and reviews, it offers customizable, visual dashboards for easy viewing of social data alongside other customer data. That’s a big time-saver.
2. Inaccuracy of Data Impedes Solving of Business Problems
Your data is only useful if it’s accurate – and many competing tools’ data isn’t. This is a huge problem when you have business problems to solve – like whether a new product will be well received, or whether your customer service game is off track, and why.
Rob Marcantonio, Associate Director, Creative Insights and Strategy for Meredith Corp is just one of many clients who cites accuracy of data as a key reason to use NetBase.
“We have evaluated other social listening platforms, but we have continued to stick with NetBase for up to five years now. A lot of that is due to the accuracy of the Natural Language Processing, the amount of data we can collect, and the flexibility that the analysis part of the platform lets us have.” – Rob Marcantonio, Associate Director, Creative Insights and Strategy for Meredith Corp.
3. Other Tools Are Just Too Complicated
As the use cases for social analytics expand beyond the marketing department, you need tools that are accessible to all who need them – not just a team of data analysts.
Our tools range from search-bar simple to more complex – so you get to choose how you process social data. In either case we have tutorials and a team of people ready to help you learn how to maximize our platform to reach your business goals with a fast, easy onboarding process, and help available every step of the way.
4. Limited Language Abilities
You can’t connect with your audience if you can’t understand them. In a global market, that means speaking the language of their geographic region, but that’s not all. Social listening tools must recognize and analyze sarcasm, slang, and pop culture references as well.
And what about visual languages – like emoji? Or images? These are also crucial to the completeness of your data – especially when they so often take the place of text. Without any other clues, visual data won’t be analyzed and counted.
That means you’re missing a lot of the conversation.
5. Tools Can’t Measure Sentiment
Sentiment is what gives social words context – and it’s the compass by which your brand should navigate when acting on social insights. Without it, you only know there’s a lot of talk about your brand. You have no idea whether that talk is good or bad.
Additionally, you need to understand strength of emotion to know if an uptick in negative chatter is about to erupt into a huge problem, or if those sharing massive love are potential influencers ready to work on your behalf.
And that’s to say nothing of the fact that identifying shared interests based on sentiment is how you segment your audiences and appeal to them on an individualized level. This is no longer optional, so you need precise sentiment analysis to guide your customer experience.
NetBase is 2X as effective at identifying sentence sentiment, and NetBase also identifies sentiment at the entity level. No other competing solution can identify sentiment at the entity level.
6. Behind the Times on Social Data Trends
One reason you’re using social analytics tools is to keep up with consumer trends, so the last thing you want is a tool that doesn’t do the same. You can’t compete with outdated software, so be wary of tools that don’t evolve alongside the rest of the world’s technology.
For the moment that means features like customer experience analytics, sentiment analysis, image analysis, artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, and real-time speed. And a commitment to be ready with whatever’s next.
7. Don’t Work Well with Other Tools
Time is now a commodity, and brands need to capitalize on it by integrating services wherever they can. It’s also hard to be lean when it takes several costly tools to accomplish all the tasks you need to run your brand effectively. This is especially important given that social data isn’t the only data that matters.
Social analytics tools that don’t play well with your CRM, social scheduling, and other tools are making your job that much harder. (By the way, our platform is very flexible in this way.)
8. No Converged Media
Similarly, you don’t have time to manually combine data from separated views of owned, earned and paid media. NetBase offers converged media so you can see these insights in one place. That helps tell you which area is getting the best (and worse) results, as well as how your combined efforts are faring – without having to jump through hoops.
9. Overly-Complicated Dashboards and Reports
Of course, your insights are worthless if it takes so long to compile or understand them they’re outdated by the time you take action. Social conversations happen in real-time, which is why social analytics tools analyze in real-time. Seeing and understanding data in real-time is paramount to maximizing it – and visual dashboards make that happen.
With a glance you can see the insights you decide are most important – or share them with decision-makers quickly and easily. You can customize dashboards according to the needs of individual business units or brand goals.
And if you want more detailed reports daily, weekly, monthly and beyond you have access to them. This is a great way to share the power of social analytics with executives who may not appreciate their value without proof.
10. Bad Customer Service
Social analytics tools are an investment – and with that investment comes an expectation. Many of our customers have shared with us the poor customer care they received from their previous social listening vendors – and are glad they found us.
We take pride in providing an exceptional customer experience for NetBase users at every level of expertise, and in being available to handle customer issues quickly. We always want our customers to know we care – and to feel that in the service we provide. We know what can happen if we fail.
Bottom Line: They Just Don’t Have It All
The reality is, plenty of solutions out there can do a number of things on this list, but few do it all – or do it all well. If you’re a small business, or new to social analytics, you may find yourself settling for a lesser tool in the short term. However, it’s eventually worth the spend to have something reliable, cutting edge, and comprehensive working for you.
This list covers the top ten reasons why companies have switched to us from previous social analytics solutions – but there are many more. Watch our “Why NetBase?” video to hear directly from some of the biggest brands and agencies out there. And when you’re ready, we invite you to find out for yourself why we’re worth the switch.
Ready now? Talk to us about all our social analytics tools can do for your brand!
