FreshNetworks Blog

This is the fifth post in our Social Media Monitoring – 2010 review series. In it we’ll be looking at the issue of duplication, one reason for some of the seemingly large differences between the seven leading social media monitoring tools under investigation – Alterian, Brandwatch, Biz360, Neilsen Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos.

We saw from the first test in our review that the different tools produced markedly different volumes for the search terms we were using – all associated with Starbucks. The smallest number of conversations was found by Biz360 and the largest by Radian6 – over 11x the difference.

So which tools are reflecting better the conversations and discussions about Starbucks? Is bigger necessarily better? Are the tools with the largest number of conversations the best? We don’t think so.

The difference in volumes is striking. If you were using Radian6 you would get the impression that eleven times as many conversations were going on about Starbucks and related terms than if you were using Biz360. There are many reasons for this and bigger is not in this case necessarily better.

Think about the following: retweets, spam, signatures, adverts. Should these be counted in your study or not? Different tools treat them in different ways and so, as we saw with the issue of location, the actual number of conversations is not always as it seems.

Firstly, there’s the source of the conversation – who did is start with? Is there more than one conversation around the same topic or is someone copying it? Is this the same tweet that’s been retweeted or is it a new conversation? These distinctions are important. If a Tweet contains certain keywords it is often retweeted automatically many many times by ‘bots’ which search Twitter for these terms and automatically reposts them.

How do you deal with spam and adverts – taking blog posts titles or key terms from them and posting them on other sites. Should these be included or not in your counts of conversations? Are they real conversations if they are automatically taken from your site and used on others? Are they important to understand if they are being used in spam sites. Or indeed sites or an unsavoury nature (you know the ones I mean!)?

How many times should a comment in a forum thread be counted? If a comment is repeated in different places or on different pages should it be counted as a new conversation? Indeed if one person posts their comment on multiple sites to try to drive traffic or showcase their point of view should all of these instances be counted as a new conversation?

You need a social media monitoring tool that deals with these and other situations. The tools that identify the most conversations are often not the most useful or accurate. They may include a range of conversations that are irrelevant, spam or double-counted. Whereas any organisation looking to understand what people are saying about your brand online wants a more accurate portrayal of what is being said.

Bigger is not necessarily better and duplication is a serious issue that needs to be addressed in any social media monitoring.

Next…

More detail on these tests, and the results,  can be found in our final report which will be available to download on Friday 16th April. We’re also holding a free social media monitoring breakfast seminar on 15th April in London, where we’ll be presenting the findings of our report, as well as giving practical tips and advice about social media monitoring and the best way to analyse results. This event is now fully booked but you can follow the results live as they are announced on Twitter from 08.30 (London time) on Thursday by following #smm10.