Before you can make a decision on which social media monitoring tool is best suited for your company and situation, it is critical to consider the goals and objectives you have in mind with the setup of a 'listening post', as there are various stages of listening...

Is your aim to simply monitor references to your company, brand, product and/or service? Or do you need to determine how you stack up against a list of your competitors? Do you wish to monitor conversations about your company or brand, and engage in these discussions? Do you like to find ways to resolve customer queries and complaints online? Is your aim to find out who the main online influencers are in your particular industry and how to best engage with them? Or is your goal to set up a research tool that helps you better understand how your customers use your product or service, and how you can most effectively meet their needs?

Once you have specified your goals, you can begin to specifydefine your actual information needs. Do you need information primarily from a specific country or region? In certain languages? How important is information about the authors of posts and articles? Are you concerned about the sentiment expressed in your online coverage? If you are, can you make do with automated sentiment analysis or should sentiment analysis be done by humans (which makes it more accurate, but also more expensive). See the purchase criteria page for a more extensive list...

There are also logistical and resource considerations. As time will be needed to filter and interpret the data, and possibly to generate reports for distribution, consideration should be given to whomwho withinin your organization or team will be able to spend time with the tool and the data. Which type of reports are required, and how often do they need to be distributed, and to whom? Or, on the other hand, would the setup of a simple dashboard be just fine?

Finally, there are financial considerations - what's your budget for a tool/project of this nature? Pricing can vary considerably by vendor as well as by usage. It is in general made up of a number of components; a monthly subscription fee, supplemented by fees based on either the total number of queries or the total number of actual results of these queries, or a combination of both.

Once you have defined your goals and information needs, you can begin with defining your specific requirements for the tool. Use this guide to further define your requirements...

Good luck, and contact us with any questions...