Which Is The Best Social Media Monitoring Platform?
Two leading analysts of social media monitoring tools updated their 2016 assessments during the last couple of weeks, with strikingly different results. One of the assessments caught Sysomos in the middle of post-acquisition integration challenges, and the other after things had started to hang together.
Sysomos leads and lags, at the same time
Forrester (The Forrester WaveTM: Enterprise Social Listening Platforms) selected 12 social media monitoring providers, based on specific criteria which all made solid sense (however the detailed criteria excluded new market entrants).
They used 30 criteria grouped into 3 buckets:
Current offering – how vendors compare in data coverage, how they process data for accuracy and how they enable insights to action. Forrester also looked at how social listening vendors help support their clients’ social strategies and their current capabilities to combine data to enable enterprise social listening.
Strategy – evaluation of each vendor’s vision and roadmap in the journey to enterprise customer listening. Vision and future-looking enhancements that lead to faster insights to action were the crux of this section.
Market presence – an assessment of the vendors market based on the number of clients, revenues, and growth rates.
At KINSHIP we most commonly use Sysomos for our social media listening and also social data analysis (research) because it has an easy-to-use interface, has good data quality, excellent data science analytics, and with the new release has great drag-and-drop dashboards which can be tailored for specific individual needs e.g. ORM, marketing, brand health, competitor analysis.
Unfortunately the Forrester analysis relegated Sysomos from a previous “leader” rating to a laggard. The reason quoted in the report was that because of Sysomos’ many recent acquisitions the story of how these all combine into a superior value proposition was not clear to the Forrester analysts.
Sysomos has all the right tools in place, but stumbles because it lacks a cohesive way to sell its value proposition. As it stands, Sysomos is a good choice for research purposes and customer insights analysts; and eventually, for customer care.
That’s true, because Sysomos has been bedding down a number of recent acquisitions adding to Heartbeat and MAP, including:
Sysomos Expion
Sysomos Gaze
Sysomos Scout
Sysomos Influence, and
Sysomos Optimize.
They have recently come together as a powerful combination.
Although not rated this time by Forrester in the leading vendors, Sysomos still ranks, by their tough criteria, in the top 12 vendors world-wide.
However, in better news for Sysomos another assessment rated them the winner of Frost and Sullivan’s Product Line Strategy Leadership Award. The Frost and Sullivan assessment was done more recently than the Forrester assessment (which was done in November 2015).
In winning the 2016 North American Social Media Monitoring Tools Product Line Strategy Leadership Award in the Social Media Monitoring Tools market, Frost and Sullivan said:
Sysomos has greatly enhanced its offerings from two impressive products to six, covering all aspects of social media listening for companies with one or multiple brands to monitor, furthering the social media monitoring tools market growth.
Frost and Sullivan noted that in addition to MAP and Heartbeat – Sysomos’ foundational tools for monitoring and measuring social media conversations – the company also offers Expion for content publishing, Optimize for the targeted selection of social media conversations of interest, Influence for the identification of key industry influencers, and Gaze, an image recognition platform with impactful visual listening capabilities.
Most recently, Sysomos launched SET (Sysomos Everything Together), enabling customers to utilize a fully-integrated solution for their social analytics requirements from MAP, Heartbeat, Influence and Optimize through a single user interface.
We are confident that Sysomos has leading tools for social media research, listening, engagement and analysis, even though it was a little early to be able to demonstrate that to Forrester.
We invite you to download the Frost and Sullivan report and share it amongst your colleagues and to learn more about Sysomos.
See what Sysomos CEO Lindsay Sparks has to say about receiving the award in his blog on sysomos.com
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