Choosing the right platform

We asked Jason about the process of choosing the right platform. He recommended ensuring the tool provides a hands-on demo so you can see for yourself how it performs when listening for your brand.

That way you can actually demonstrate to the budget holder that it can add value over existing or competing tools.

However, he has found that often a monitoring tool will demo their platform using huge brands, and of course listening for the biggest brands will return rich data with thousands of mentions across many sites. If your brand is not the size of Apple or Coca-Cola, this type of demo might not give you an accurate picture of your experience.

Understanding the right features

A hands-on demo with the platform will tell you whether it has the capability to perform as you need it to. For Jason and FXCM, the first feature they look for is quality of data.

For a smaller brand there are two considerations here; can the platform retrieve data from smaller, more niche, sites and despite the smaller volume, is the data high quality enough that it can still provide actionable insights?

FXCM has a general sense of where the conversations are occurring and which forums are important to them, so they can then check if the tool is picking up all of these.

This is of vital importance, “especially in social media where it’s very important that all the data I need to find can be found and the tools are working properly”.

The second feature Jason looks for is customization. As social data is increasingly used in more and more departments, being able to see the data in a way of your choosing, pulling different insights to the fore when presenting it to different departments and managers is also really important.

“One thing I’ve learned over time is that we really need, as new situations start to come out, whether it’s PR or advertising or our sales and support team, to be able to manipulate that data and show it exactly how we want to show it.”

He said that while it can be tempting to opt for an easy to set up, one-size-fits-all layout, particularly when a brand is making its first forays into social media intelligence, that benefit quickly recedes.

“Not being able to customize, for example the dashboard and how you’re presenting that data, really hamstrings you – especially once you start wanting to look at very specific data and comparing it.”