Listening social media: what can be heard today and from what sources

The must-have sources for top-notch social media listening.

After years and years of testing hundreds of software programs, I have come to one conclusion: no two software programs dedicated to Listening social media are the same as each other.

Each company that produces these tools has had a slightly different idea and tries to come up with something original, improving a specific function, changing a little something here and there, adding something else again, and so on.

So the boundaries between one software and another are often blurred.

The main differences that distinguish one network listening software from another include first and foremost the sources monitored (followed by the filters and graphs available).

Today I want to talk to you specifically about social listening sources, a basic aspect of market analysis . If you don’t collect the right data and pull it from the right sources, you can analyze it as well as you want but you won’t get anywhere.

Software that plumbs the entire sea called the Web? Impossible!

First skeleton in the closet of social media listening tools: when it comes to monitoring blogs, forums, and online media, it is not physically possible for software to monitor the ENTIRE web.

It has happened to me countless times that customers would call angrily saying:

“I found a local newspaper article online that had not been tracked by the software!“

It would be strange otherwise, as even Google cannot monitor 100% of what the sites contain!

When it comes to blog articles, media and forums, network listening software can choose whether:

• Buy the data from some aggregator, or…
• build their own network of crawlers (or in many cases to do both combined).

So there will be software that monitors more or fewer sources in a certain geographic area, or in certain areas where they are most covered.

This is perfectly normal. The important thing, however, is that you can add to your monitoring the sources that serve you and the achievement of your goals the most.

In fact, if you need to monitor just that particular blog that deals with exactly the issues you are interested in, good software should be able to add it to the sources so that you can monitor it from that point on.

So here’s a question to ask software vendors, “Can new sources be added or not?”

Personally, from experience I strongly advise you against choosing software where you really cannot add sources. Over time you will almost certainly need to broaden the spectrum of what you are tracking, shaping the software to what you need.

The other type of sources next to blogs, forums and media are social networks, for which the discussion is a bit different.

Read also: Brand listening: why and how to listen to those who talk about your company

How do the tools for monitoring social networks work?

Each software states which social networks it is currently tracking as well as how and which it plans to add in the future.

Usually the main socials are tracked by all: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, while others are less frequent, such as socials used in Eastern Europe (VKontakte) and China (SinaWeibo, WeChat, TencentWeibo).

Clearly, if you have no interest in Chinese social tracking, this aspect will not affect your choice!

If that is your focus, however, then it will be worth choosing software dedicated only to Eastern social networks, perhaps using it in a complementary way to more “Western” software.

Here, however, are some skeletons as well.

The skeletons in the closet of social network listening: which platform will be best for social listening?

When you are told that a software monitors the main social channels, even then it is not all rosy. Each social network has “issues” that different providers can solve more or less well, and that directly impact the quality of the software.

Here are, below, which ones:

• Twitter is the social network that provides the most data, however, in order to be fully tracked, i.e., taking 100 percent of the tweets, it must have laced the so-called “firehose,” which costs the software manufacturer quite a bit of money. Otherwise, you will only have access to about 10 percent of the tweets, and you will miss quite a few. Software that has the firehose usually cost much more than those that don’t have it (and in case they can activate it for certain projects), so you have to figure out yourself whether it’s worth it to you to spend that much more or not–but at least it’s good to know what you can get!
• Facebook no longer allows data to be collected by keyword as it once did, even on public results. To understand each other, one cannot search for the word “Nutella” and receive all the posts posted on Facebook. It simply cannot be done. The only thing you can do is to extract all the posts published on a determined public page for which you have the link. The consequence? The different software are building up over time a huge list of Facebook pages, from which they continuously download all the posts into huge databases. It will then be on the data in that database that they can do the research to find what we need! So the equation is easy: the more pages monitored, the more results. If a page is not on the list–its contents will not be monitored. We are all in the same boat, and again the important thing is that you can add new pages when you start a new monitoring and then on and on over time!
• Linkedin… Panic: it cannot be monitored. Give up all hope or you who enter! It is worse than fort-knox, giving no opportunity to collect anything besides the contents of one’s public pages. Simply put, you can only extrapolate content from your profile. So don’t ask, let it go a priori! However, if you are interested in having aggregate data, so without being able to read the posts and see the names of the people who wrote them, but to know how many people in that geographic area are talking about that thing, then a special service was born. Obviously the cost is very high, but it gives you advanced information that is critical for those who invest a lot of money in advertising on Linkedin.

But in short. What can we find out from the sources accessed by software?

Read also: Social listening: what it is and why you can’t do without it today

What social media listening allows you to discover

As you probably know if you’ve read our previous insights, social listening tools constantly monitor the web, collecting and cataloging all the content on the topics you care about.

That’s not all: all intercepted conversations are translated into precise information that will help you make marketing and business decisions beneficial to your company.

Social media listening software allows you to extract useful information about the conversations revolving around your company or a specific topic. Specifically, with these tools you can find out:

• How much people talk about a particular topic
• Where they talk about it
• Who talks about it
• What is said
• How to talk about it

Also, among sources, it is becoming increasingly important to track not only texts but also images. Some software also offers the ability to recognize logos and products in photos shared on social, so-called visual listening.

By recognizing logos and products from images, you can discover about 80 percent more mentions in which users have posted about your product but have not bothered to write about it in the text of the post.

There is usually a separate cost for visual listening, but I suggest you find out whether or not it is available, because it could be very useful for you!

Final Conclusions.

Today I told you about social media listening and how it is critical to answering valuable questions about your target market, your brand, and your competitors.

This process of market research also helps you clearly understand what is happening around you online and take charge, guiding your most important business decisions.

Want more information about this and understand what we at CMI can do with social listening software? Click here to contact us!