Social Media Monitoring: FreePint's Recent Reviews
Jinfo Blog

By Chris Porter

Abstract

FreePint has recently been taking a look at a range of social media monitoring and management tools, from vendors including Engage121, PR Newswire, Brandwatch, Cision and Digimind. Chris Porter briefly recaps some of the most striking features of each service.

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Over the last few weeks, FreePint has been taking a very close look at some of the many enterprise software tools for monitoring and managing social media conversations.

At the outset we said that the range of offerings is vast and vendors approach the activity from many different angles.

So what has been most striking about the various products we have looked at?

Engage121 (reviewed here) stands out in the set as the tool which puts most emphasis on the process of managing social media interactions.

It is designed to do this on a large scale, whether in terms of responding to social media posts from the world at large or proactively preparing and disseminating corporate messages through social media channels.

The CisionPoint platform offered by Swedish-based multinational company Cision (reviewed here) impresses with its focus on identifying key influencers, as well as its wide multilingual content set.

Cision has naturally extended its previous focus on managing influential traditional-media contacts, so that now it can help communicators to home in on both traditional and social media commentators.

The Agility platform from PR Newswire (reviewed here) is also to be commended for the way that it integrates traditional and social within its media monitoring, as well as for some neat filtering and drill-down options and good links through to the company’s core press release distribution capabilities.

Digimind Social (reviewed by Aileen Marshall) marries wide-ranging social media monitoring with some intriguing analysis and visualisation tools.

Most of the services described above focus on very simple, end-user-centric searching. If your interest is rather in very precise and targeted searching, monitoring, research and analysis, potentially covering multiple languages, fast-growing Brandwatch (reviewed here) is very well worth a look.

What's Upcoming?

While this collection of reviews is drawing to a close, FreePint will continue to look at other interesting examples of social media monitoring tools.

A review of Singapore-based vendor Webfluenz is pending and we expect to address some other significant vendors later in the year. As ever, your suggestions are welcome.

Editor's Note

FreePint readers may be interested to read more about news products in our FreePint Topic Series: Beyond Aggregation, which ran from October to November 2013. You can still register your interest to receive a free copy of the FreePint Report: Buyer's Guide on News Content published in early December.

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