Introduction

Social listening tool comparison can be a daunting task. There's so much to consider, and its complex to compare solutions side-by-side.

Hello.Welcome to this social media listening technology comparison head-to-head. We are The Social Intelligence Lab, a professional community for people running social intelligence programs at the world's leading brands and agencies. Before you continue, we want to give you some important information about the study and this report. We are the publishers of the comparison study. We did not design and run the study, and we are not the authors of the remainder of this report.The study was given to us by our community members at the Publicis Groupe Social Media Intelligence Unit. The research was part of an 'unofficial' vendor comparison internal to their team. The vendors in the study were also unaware that this research and comparison was being undertaken.Vendors included in this unofficial study were Crimson Hexagon, NetBase, Talkwalker, Sysomos and YouScan.The purpose of the study was to better understand the performance of the vendors, in relation to:

Data sources and data volumes.

Automated NLP sentiment analysis.

The research was undertaken in August 2019, at a time when some of the vendors were making significant changes to their platforms. These changes include the merger between Crimson Hexagon and Brandwatch which has resulted in a new combined platform Brandwatch Consumer Research, and also the merger between Sysomos and Meltwater to create a new combined platform called Meltwater Social Solutions. The Social Media Intelligence Unit did not have access to these new platforms, they were using the older Crimson Hexagon and Sysomos platforms. It is also likely that the other vendors have made changes to their respective technology.Meaning that the research is out-of-date. The Social Intelligence Lab is committed to galvanizing the growth of the social intelligence (and wider digital consumer intelligence) industry through community building, knowledge and debate. It is with this focus that we have published the findings of the comparison study. The opinions stated in this report are that of the Publicis Groupe's Social Media Intelligence Unit. We have also given each vendor the opportunity to comment on the findings, which you will find in chapter nine. This report should not be used as a buyers guide. This report was only designed for reference, and to spark debate amongst social intelligence practitioners. It has also raised some important questions:

What does compliance look like in social data analysis? How are vendors using crawlers and are they compliant?

The complex nature of learning each individual platform, its functionality, and classifiers. Analysts may not think that a particular function is available, but it just operates in a different way in that particular technology. Do we have enough training available?

How should you display sample posts from Twitter? There's a direct conflict between Twitter policy and market research ethics.

As a professional community designed to raise the professional standards in the social intelligence industry, we hope to explore and work towards a solution to these challenges in the near future. If you would like to join us on this journey, please email hello@thesilab.com.We hope you enjoy this social listening comparison study. We also welcome your thoughts and opinions on the report.