The Social Intelligence Tech Buyer’s Guide
Looking to freshen up your social listening tech stack? Maybe you want to find a social listening tool that can help with a specific use case. Or maybe you’re starting from scratch with social listening and you need advice on how to begin choosing a tool. Well look no further. This ultimate and - more importantly - independent guide will take you through the entire buying process, from asking the right questions to zero-ing in on the best tool.
Download this jam-packed guide for:
A step-by step guide through the social listening tech buying process
Independent advice, that isn’t pushing you to buy a specific social listening tool
Tips and tricks from experts (i.e. people who have tested A LOT of tools)
A complete list of questions to ask tech vendors so you can go into demo calls feeling confident
Checklists to make sure you’re covering all the functionalities you need for your use cases
Insights into how Microsoft, Nestlé and Walmart built their social listening tech stacks
Advice on how to approach budgeting
...and more
What are social listening tools?
You can learn so much about your customers by looking at the things they say and share online - on social media, in forums and across other internet spaces. The problem is, there’s so much information that it’s almost impossible to analyse it all manually. That’s where social listening tools come in. They can help you to collect and analyse data from the internet more easily and on a much bigger scale.
But there isn’t just one type of social listening technology. Depending on what insights you want to get from social data, you’ll need to use the right tool, whether that’s for brand monitoring, audience insights, trend prediction or video analysis. In fact, you might want to use more than one tool to cover all of the social listening use cases that are important to your business. In this case, you’ll want to build a tech stack.
There’s a lot to consider when building a tech stack though, which is why we’ve created this guide.
How to find new social listening technology
The social listening tech landscape has been growing exponentially over the last few years, so there are new tools appearing all the time.
Not all of them are going to be relevant to your work, and you’re probably not going to want to be changing your tech stack every second month! But it’s important to stay on top of developments in the space so that when you’re ready to upgrade your existing tool, or you need to cover a new use case, you already have an idea of what’s out there that could help.
Keeping track of all of them is tricky though! In this guide, we’ll share some tips on how to find new tools – especially the niche ones – and how to keep track of changes in technology.
Finding the right tool for your business?
Some decisions are easy to make – there’s a right and a wrong choice. Unfortunately, that’s not the case when it comes to choosing social listening technology. We can’t tell you what’s the best social listening tool…there isn’t one that is objectively better than another.
Instead, it's about understanding what your organisation needs when it comes to social listening – the use cases that are most important and the type of insights you want to find. And the only way you’ll know this is by talking to people across the business, finding out how they’ll be using social listening insights, understanding their technical skills and assessing their ability to analyse data. The answers to these questions will help you to choose the right tool – or tools.
It's a long process – there’s no quick fix – but if you do it properly, you’ll save a lot of time, and money, in the long run.
And you’re not alone in going through this. We’ve spoken to several organisations who have thoroughly audited and researched their social listening technology needs, and we’ve shared their experiences in the guide.
What features and functionalities should I look for in my social listening tool?
When you start researching social listening technology, it’s really easy to be blinded by all the bells and whistles that are on offer: generative AI assistants, sentiment analysis, data visualisation, non-English language analysis, video analytics…the list goes on.
Utimately, deciding what features and functionality you need your social listening tool to provide goes back to the initial research you did about your business needs. Different use cases will require specific features, and depending on who is going to be using the technology – or the insights generated from social listening – you might need a specific functionality.
The best way to find out whether the technology meets your needs though is to test it yourself with your own use cases.
Once you’ve narrowed down the tools that look right for you on paper, ideally you’ll ask for free access to them for a limited time to make sure they actually do what you want them to. If you’re testing multiple tools, it’s important to do this in a methodical way to make sure you can compare them fairly. We asked a few social intelligence tool experts for their tips on how to make the most out of these free demos, so download the full guide to hear what they say.
How much should I spend on a social listening tool?
That all-important question: how much should I spend? And the frustrating – but correct – answer is…how long is a piece of string?
Again, there are so many factors to consider, that there isn’t one answer we can give you. One thing which will impact the cost, is how many social listening tools you need. Most organisations use three but, again, this will depend on your social intelligence use cases. You might need more, you might need less.
Another important factor that will impact your budget is the pricing models that each tool offers. For example, some will price access by the number of users, others will price based on the number of searches. The best model, again, depends on how you will be using the tool. So before you make an expensive mistake by signing a contract you can’t get out of, you’ll want to spend some time thinking about this.
Download the complete Social Intelligence Tech Buyer’s Guide
Whether this is the first time you’re choosing social listening tools or you’re a seasoned professional when it comes to the latest tech, building the right social listening tech stack for your business can be daunting. Especially with so many technology providers out there, trying to pitch you the new big thing.
Don’t worry though, it doesn’t have to be stressful. We’ve created this guide to help you navigate the process step-by-step, giving you checklists of the important things to consider and the crucial questions you need to ask when testing different tech. Plus, with advice from others in the industry who have gone through the exact same process you’re about to, you can learn from their mistakes and find the most useful tools for your business with the least amount of stress.
Want to see what tools are out there?
Check out our SITech Landscape to discover all the categories of social listening technology and every tool available.