When you’re using social media as part of your overall PR strategy one of the most important aspects to consider is how you’ll be monitoring the socialscape (did I just make that word up? I think I did.)

Social media monitoring allows you to do several things:

• -       You can identify where conversations are happening about your brand, and what’s being said.
• -       You can get involved in these conversations.
• -       You can measure the effectiveness of a campaign based on how much discussion it generates. Kind of like digital column inches.
• -       It’ll help you be first off the mark if any changes in your industry are afoot or if you’re suddenly faced with a crisis.

There’s some great free social media monitoring tools – check out the Econsultancy blog for a list of 20 of the best – but if you’re looking for a really comprehensive listening & engagement tool there are several paid-for services you can use.

This week I’ve been trialling 2, Radian6 and Meltwater Buzz. (Meltwater approached us after we sent a tweet out about our Radian6 trial – clearly they’re doing some competitor monitoring of their own).

I’ve had loads of fun playing with both, learning new things and tracking conversations about one of our clients. Both set us up with a free trial and we also had a webinar with the Radian6 crew to show us the ropes.

Both were great and each returned an impressive amount of results. I didn’t run a totally fair test as I used slightly different sets of keywords for each but the impression I get is that Meltwater returns a higher volume but that Radian6 is the quicker of the two.

In terms of managing workflow – sorting through the chunks of information and marking conversations to get involved with or assigning the data – Meltwater has a few more options but they’re basically pretty similar.

My favourite thing about using Meltwater was having the ability to split and sort the data quickly and visually – sorting by different demographics for example.

Of the two though, I think I preferred Radian6, although there definitely wasn’t much in it. It’s the one I mastered the fastest and for me it felt more intuitive, plus having the video tutorials there helped a lot. Also, it’s more aesthetically pleasing. I appreciate this might seem kind of like being asked what car you’d most like to drive and saying, a red one, but there’s certainly something to be said for choosing the option that feels the best for you. Especially when they’re both good.  

I'd be really interested in hearing from anyone who's had experience of using these (or any other paid-for monitoring system) over a longer timeframe. How do they shape up in the long term?