Radian 6 Review – Social Media Monitoring Tool

I had a great conversation with a guy called Cory at Radian 6 today. He talked me through the their social media monitoring tool, developed internally by their guys in the States.  I think anyone that provides SEO services should be aware of such tools as they can play an important role for more than just social media marketers.

The Issues and Opportunities of Social Media

One of the ongoing problems that social media marketers have is the degree to which they can gauge how effective each social media marketing campaign has been.  I have said before that for social media to be a realistic marketing solution, it has to tick a lot of business boxes…these boxes include items such as accountability, understanding (i.e. not making it a stab in the dark) and of course creating a return on the investment.

Not only this but for social media marketers to be the perfect social media marketers it certainly helps if you can be everywhere, socialising, all of the time!  Social media monitoring tools help industry professionals keep their ears and eyes open to new opportunities, responses to marketing efforts and mine this invaluable data on a level not previously possible.

Importantly for marketers social media is measurable in many ways:

Users of social media share a lot more than just their opinion. Those who enter the social media domain leave behind a lot of clues about who they are and how they think via information found in social bookmarks, comments, engagement, influence, friends, followers, downloads, favorites, views, votes and links. From all of these user actions, you can measure what’s important, what ideas are gaining ground and who, or what, is having the biggest impact on your, or your client’s brand.

…so this certainly awakens the need to tackle so many social media management issues.

Social Media Monitoring and Online Reputation Management

Social media monitoring has become all the more important as more conversations are recorded online. This means that brands have the opportunity to listen-in on the conversations around their brand, and deal in online reputation management there and then if they choose to do so. You can imagine the benefits of this if you are a working with a brand where an immediate response would be value in any way as it puts out the flames before they have even begun.  For this reason and others, I wanted to provide a bit of coverage to a tool that I have been exposed to lately called Radian 6 – a premium social media monitoring tool.

Radian 6 Tool

There’s loads of information provided by Radian 6 on their website and their sales guys are really helpful, but I just wanted to provide a run-down on my perspective of it’s pro’s and con’s.

If you’re unaware of Radian 6, this is how they describe themselves:

Monitor social media effectively with Radian6’s user-friendly web dashboard.  It allows topics to be quickly set up for monitoring, queries and analysis.  Use it to uncover seemingly hidden issues and trends that could affect strategic directions for clients.  Easily share the real-time analysis with clients and others to support your recommendations and proposals.

Radian 6 Dashboard

The dashboard for Radian 6 is really easy to use. It has an array of different windows that can be flipped over to access their settings. These are really quite more extensive than at first sight and provides plenty of opportunity to drill-down into the item(s) discussed around the brand in question.

Brand Conversations and Engagement

Interestingly, Radian 6 allows brand owners, social media marketers and SEO’s to see the comments on a live basis in what they call River of News – a cheesy term for a live feed where you receive brand mentions.  Here you can mine this data in more detail to their location, their various networks, the positivity towards your brand and even the degree to which they influence your market.

Benefits to the Marketing / SEO Agency

As a result of being able to easily and accurately monitor the response to social media activity, agencies can save time in reporting, learn more about their clients consumers, be more accountable for their success or failure and of course justify continued expenditure in the SMM field…something that could pose as a serious competitive advantage.

This is where Radian 6 see the key benefits for agencies and brand manager’s alike:

• spend less time collecting brand sentiment data and trend data
• uncover the top online influencers affecting your clients’ brands and develop a plan to engage them
• analyse trends and spot opportunities for your clients – something that might be priceless
• find and promote third party endorsements, by retweeting them as an example
• justify more advertising and engagement in social media through accountability and ROI
• give your creative department a new way to research an audience or use content for concept inspiration.

For SEO though, there are great benefits too…it picks up on positive/negative trends around brands, keyword clouds that are used around your brand, highlights key market influencers that could help in championing products/services.

As every marketer wants to get closer to their niche’s consumers and promote 2-way engagement in conversations around the brand online social media monitoring tools are increasingly being seen as the way forward for many agencies.

Negative Points for Radian 6

There are plenty of social media monitoring tools, but none as far as I can tell that are this comprehensive (please let me know if you know of others around a similar kind of grade)…but for this you have to pay a fair amount.  Think along the lines of £500/month/brand…then again, for the insight and engagement opportunities it provides, it really could be justified.

Outstanding Points from Radian 6 - these points are not exactly negative but I would like to know more.  As extensive as the conversation was, I still left the meeting with a few outstanding questions about the reach of the tool, especially as it relies upon it’s own bots. Questions I have raised have included a break-down of the API’s used and an understanding of the reach of the in-house search bots, but more testing will help me understand that I hope.

Additional Suggestions & Tools

Online social media monitoring tools are not the only means of analysing your prospective consumer base, visitors and general online activity. Also think about tools and data found at services such as:

• Hitwise / ComScore / Nielsen / Compete – site/industry stats
• Rank Pulse, maybe? – changes in search rankings
• Google Analytics / Woopra – website analytics
• Clickheat / Crazy Egg – site-usage via heat mapping
• Keyword Research Tools – understanding keyword usage and search volume
• Competitiveness analysis tools and queries
• For monitoring Twitter conversations, try Monitter

But remember, in researching your market, search marketing tools can only go so far. A healthy level of analysis and experience creates a massive amount of value in using these tools.  Although I have to say, I am pretty excited about using it some more!

Have you used Radian 6 or any other social media monitoring tool?  Please share…

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