Buzz monitoring tool selection checklist

Buzz monitoring and social media platforms may be used for publishing, monitoring, engaging, and measurement. Tools tend to focus on one or two of these areas, but many attempt to include features of three or even four.Before assuming one tool is best, consider how your organisation is set up – will the same people be doing each of these activities? If not, maybe a suite of tools best suited to each purpose would be better.Here are some considerations to think about when checking whether a tool is right for you.

Potential uses of buzz monitoring platforms

Think about how important each of the points below is, and whether the data will really be actionable:

• Find out what people are saying about:
  • our brand;
  • our product(s);
  • our competitors;
  • our sector.
• Discover customer insights to feed in to planning / strategy / R&D / content (topics, sentiment, timing).
• Measure social media effectiveness across the entire customer decision journey (awareness, actions, advocacy metrics).
• Measure engagement with specific pieces of our own social media content to find out what’s working.
• Measure mentions by our audience about us.
• Measure impact of campaigns.
• Ongoing measurement of key metrics tied to objectives (KPIs). (Which ones?)
• Be alerted about potential social media crises / influential mentions / opportunities.
• Monitor a known crisis as it happens.
• Discover and monitor influencers / advocates / detractors.
• Export social media data.
• Integrate social media data into other systems / dashboards e.g. w/ Google analytics / CRM.
• Anything else?

What will you do with the information?

Think about how important the following will be:

• One-off research reports on specific topics / campaigns
• Regular ongoing reporting (daily access to dashboard? Monthly PDF report?).
• Create reports for other stakeholders in the business (who? what about?).
• Allow other stakeholders in the business to have their own dashboard logins (who? what would they use it for?).
• Have a live data dashboard on a big screen in the office (to promote data thinking and importance of digital/social).
• Anything else?

Potential functionality in social media engagement platforms

Think about whether you need to following functionality:

• Assign mentions on owned social media accounts to customer service advisors.
• Assign mentions across whole public internet to customer service advisors.
• Allow advisors to add notes for each other (behind the scenes) about a mention.
• Allow advisors to have different access rights (read/write).
• Automatic assigning to certain teams/individuals based on keyword matching (rules).
• Detailed audit trail including behind-the-scenes activity and timings.
• Reporting per team / individual e.g. volume of resolved cases.
• Anything else?

Potential functionality in content planning/publishing platforms

Ask whether you’ll need to be able to do any of the following:

• Create Facebook & Twitter posts and tweets (copy and upload images) in the platform.
• Schedule posts.
• Publish posts.
• Different access rights / roles for individuals and teams (read/write/publish).
• Workflow between individuals and teams (assign / approve).
• Audit trail of workflow.
• Manual tagging / categorisation of posts.
• View content calendar.
• Anything else?

Think about all of the above purposes and consider what your needs are before engaging with a platform supplier. Then use the list above to check that the functionality will address your needs.Let us know how you get on!