Analytics have become a key component for informing strategy and measuring the effectiveness of social marketing. Even networks like LinkedIn have begun offering analytics tools to members who use the platform for content marketing. But what about broader multi-network models? G2 Crowd, a business software review platform, analyzed the top performers in the social analytics field.
G2 Crowd used data from more than 200 user reviews to plot the top services on a grid ranking with the axis of customer satisfaction and market presence. Customer satisfaction scores were based on product reviews and weighted factors like Promoter Score, overall popularity, and customer satisfaction with second-level product attributes.
Market presence scores took into account everything from number of employees for the parent company and product, and vendor momentum based on search traffic, to Klout score and overall company revenue.
SimplyMeasured was the only company to rank as a “leader,” with the highest scores in both categories. Other tools like Crimson Hexagon and Unmetric were ranked as “high performers,” because of their smaller market shares but high customer satisfaction.
Spredfast, Topsy and other services fell into the ‘niche’ category because customer satisfaction and market share scores were lower, but the services still received enough user reviews to qualify for the grid.
Some interesting points were raised during the study period. For instance, users had some clear expectations of the social analytics software. Also, some users saw discrepancies between the data provided by native analytic and the third-party analytics.
Tim Handorf, co-founder and president of G2 Crowd, noted that while satisfied with some tools, users wanted a better overall solution:
Based on user feedback it is clear that the new mandate for social analytics companies is to deliver a single version of the social truth for their clients. Much like the challenge of business intelligence in years past, buyers are impatient with having to cobble together all the various perspectives on their customers and stakeholders from different tools. The new race in social analytics is presenting a single, reconciled view of social activity in a way that provides a single, trusted source of actionable insight.
For more information, and to view the interactive grid, click the previous link.
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