By Chris Lee

Just one third (34 per cent) of social media marketers are happy with the social media monitoring tools they have invested in, according to a study out recently. Two thirds (60 per cent) feel their tool is “OK” but would be willing to make the switch if something better came along, posing the question: Are social media monitoring tools providing social media marketers with the data they need to do their job to the best of their ability?

Social media monitoring priorities

The study, conducted by social media website OneForty and research group Kissmetrics, found that “relationship with the vendor” was the least important factor in selecting a social media monitoring tool, while versatility of the metrics and simplicity of the user interface were the most important factors for social media monitoring tool buyers.

Price was found to only be a relative concern for social media marketers when looking at social media monitoring tools, although more than half (54 per cent) spend less than $100 per month on social media monitoring tools. A quarter of social media marketers (25 per cent) spend more than $500 a month on social media monitoring.

Ged Carroll of PR agency Ruder Finn said that currently within social media there is a demand to demonstrate return on investment and measure results with a corresponding result to invest in the tools and time to make them work.

Carroll told NMK: “There was a heuristic in PR that it was best practice for a third of a project budget should go on measurement, advertising also invests in both research and measurement; yet the numbers around social media seem to be proportionally far less. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys – maybe as an industry we are getting the measurement tools that we deserve rather than the tools that we need?”

Twitter as a social media monitoring tool

Twitter is one of the key free tools that companies use to monitor comments on their brand, products, services and industry. Just seven per cent of marketers said that would not be disappointed if they didn’t have access to Twitter, according to the OneForty study.

According to another study by Survey IQ found that more than three quarters (76 per cent) of social media marketers use Twitter for business use. A quarter of social media marketers use desktop Twitter monitoring apps, such as TweetDeck, while a further quarter (24 per cent) use mobile Twitter applications to keep on top of monitoring while on the move.

No silver bullet in social media monitoring

For Jed Hallam, communities director for marketing agency VCCP Share, one of the biggest issues with social media monitoring is that - like social media campaign measurement - people are “looking for silver bullets”. For Hallam, the most effective social media monitoring tool is the one that fits the platform and that organisations feel most comfortable with, which could always be a free tool such as TweetDeck.
“As with any of these things though, common sense and an action plan go much further than an all-in-one tool,” Hallam told NMK. “Research the platform, collect all the tools, decide which are going to be used. Sadly, one of the most commonly overlooked areas is a connection to real time. Most tools will provide alerts when the application/web page is open, some will provide you with an email or RSS feed, but few will give you a push message or text when something happens. In an environment that accelerates conversations, it's important to be as close to real time as possible.”

Click here for a list of social media monitoring tools.