A comparison of 36 social media monitoring software tools
There are a bewildering number of social media monitoring tools to choose from. A 2015 comparison of social media listening tools from Ideya Ltd shows that there are around 250 tools available. Of these 191 are paid, with the remainder free or using a combined model.
How to decide which tool(s) is best for you?
Knowing how to decide on the best tool is certainly challenging. This post isn't as comprehensive or up-to-date as the latest Ideya report, thanks to all the merger and acquisition activity in this area, but it compares 36 of the best known social media listening tools including free and paid. If you want to know the free tools go straight to category 4.
The bulk of the work on the original post was completed by a specialist, Michael Brewer of Clerestorey who compiled this comprehensive directory of…
Do you think the hype about social media vastly exaggerates the commercial reality of it's importance?
If you do, this post is for you - it presents one example as proof against the hype if your colleagues are asking "Why don't we have a social presence", it's also a great excuse for me to embed the best rap song ever...
The full video isn't available for Embed (thanks Universal).
Introducing the EFT ratio
One thing that social media proponents are fond of is dissing email; foretelling the death of email. But the reality is that for most brands email works fantastically well.
Sure, we need to work at increasing relevance in email by better targeting - that's right touching - but Email delivers in terms of reach…
Compilation of Twitter lists
Update 6th November 2009
Well it didn't take long for a service compiling the most popular Twitter lists by category. Thanks Listorius! Here are a selection:
Marketing Twitter Lists
SEO Twitter Lists
Social Media Twitter Lists
Email Marketing Twitter Lists
My original post explaining benefits of Twitter Lists
Twitter introduced Lists, a major new feature, End October 2009, which should help all Twitter aficionados manage the Twitter firehose better since if offers categorisation / grouping of Tweets from related sources by interest - however you define interest! It's your choice. You can also follow lists compiled by others to save time. A good example from Robert Scoble is shown below. This should also be an improvement on ad-hoc lists like this popular post I created on the Best marketers to follow on Twitter for learning about digital marketing - I have now converted these lists into Twitter lists…
One of the most interesting aspects of digital marketing currently is watching and advising companies developing strategies for how Twitter can support their business. I did a roundup in Feb 2009 on different approaches businesses are taking in their Twitter strategy.
So, I was pleased to receive a review copy of the Twitter book by @timoreilly who is best known for first defining the Web 2.0 concept and has over 600,000 followers (not bad for a business bod) and @SarahM who is a Twitter specialist who describes herself in her bio as the 21st user of Twitter.
This post gives a brief review of the book and highlights, what for me, were the 10 most useful practical tips for companies developing their Twitter business strategy. Since I like to be useful, I'll also summarise some of the tools I found useful in the book which I wasn't aware of.
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Update, June 2009 - see my review of O'Reilly Book on developing Twitter business strategy.
Everyone is familiar with the rapid growth in followers of celebrities such as @stephenfry and @britneyspears on Twitter. As the chart from Twitter Counter shows there has been an acceleration in adoption in 2009 has celebs have used offline media to drive their followers.
You may also have seen my post on the top digital marketers (consultants, publishers and agencies) to follow on Twitter - this shows how many digital marketers are learning from each other through Twitter.
But how are businesses using Twitter? And is Twitter worthwhile for all types of business? In this post I will review some examples of how companies from the UK and US are using Twitter in different categories of benefits.
How Dell use Twitter for different business applications
Before…
Why the list?
Many marketers on Twitter are still relatively new to it, and like me have the challenge of needing to keep up-to-date across the whole of digital marketing.
So, I wrote this post at the start of 2009 to show who I think is really worthwhile following, i.e. there is a good signal to noise ratio focusing on insights which help me learn about the latest developments or best practice. I've updated it in 2010 to include others I now regularly follow.
My recommendations on who to follow are categorised across all the the different areas of online marketing shown in the diagram below based on who I have found useful to follow to keep me up-to-date, advance my knowledge. Generally I have just included real people rather than publishers or information sites that just push updates and don't interact.
I hope you find my tweets useful too! - I try to act…
