A key component of listening to social media involves knowing where to listen. Monitoring blogs is an important step, but what if the real action around your company is in product reviews? Your listening plan needs to include the types of media that are relevant in your market. If you use an external social media analysis provider, they need to cover the relevant media types for you.
Last year, it was easy to assume that blog monitoring was social media analysisâ€"the discussion was all about what consumers were saying on blogs. Almost all of the vendors tracked blogs, but there was a question about measuring blog comments. This year, things are different. New types of social media have emerged, and vendors have increased their coverage.
As I collected information for the new edition of the Guide to Social Media Analysis, I asked vendors specifically about the media types they cover in their monitoring or analysis. 58 companies answered the question. Here's a summary of their responses:
Media type (examples)* | Coverage |
Blog posts | 100% |
Blog comments | 97% |
Discussion boards | 97% |
Product reviews | 93% |
Social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Ning) | 88% |
Client-provided data (CRM data, customer email or chat sessions, private message boards) | 83% |
Social news (Delicious, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon) | 81% |
Video sharing (YouTube) | 74% |
Microblogging (Friendfeed, Plurk, Twitter) | 74% |
Usenet newsgroups | 64% |
Print media | 62% |
Photo sharing (Flickr) | 60% |
Podcasts | 45% |
Television | 40% |
Radio | 34% |
*A few companies listed other sources, such as transcripts of analyst calls, price-comparison sites and proprietary research sources.
The detailsâ€"along with 63 vendor profilesâ€"are in the second edition of the Guide to Social Media Analysis.
Link to original post