Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

How many results will there be? How big an account do I need?

These questions are understandably common given that our pricing is based on total number of results in your account. I hear them everyday as I work with prospective customers who are doing proposals for social media monitoring (yes, I do help with developing your business model around SM2- shoot me a note if you’d like to know more).

Given that even a moderately well-known brand can generate large numbers of results, it is important to have some idea of what you’re getting into before you commit to a plan. We have developed a tool to help with this.

First let me define ’search results’ within SM2. Search results are any mention of your keyword(s) in social media. They might be a blog post, a Tweet, a comment on a wall, a forum post, a wiki entry, etc. However, a search result is much more than that. It is also a set of data points that we collect that are associated with that result. These include all kinds of things including any demographic info, tags and categories, Alexa, Technorati and PageRank data, geo-location, etc. Up to 35 fields depending on what’s available in publically accessible places (we don’t violate EULAs).

This is important because we use that data to build our analysis of your results.

Back to the estimator tool. When you’re planning a social media monitoring project you can contact us and we’ll run your keyword phrases through the tool (it’s internal) to get you a ballpark estimate of how many results we have in our ever-expanding database aka the ’social media warehouse’. This gives you, and your client or team, an idea of the expense required to accurately measure the full response in social media- before you commit to a plan.