How do you compare social media analytics vendors?

Having a clear understanding of your pain points will help the sales team showcase the value of their solutions and this will help you compare offerings.

Look if they have an official partnership with the platforms such as measurement partnerships. That shows reliability of the data long term & accuracy.

From experience this is widely different apart from X (Twitter) who has a completely open API (for now) and LinkedIn which has a completely closed API every other source can vary from tool to tool. Especially websites. Best practice is definitely having a list of websites and other sources you want to listen to and see who can provide the best match.

The short answer is you SHOULDN’T be comparing metrics across social platforms. A view / click / impression / engagement is different on LinkedIn than it is on Twitter (X) which is different than TikTok. The platforms define their metrics differently, collect data different (ie first part vs third party) have different contextually elements and have different definitions of what constitutes a user. Instead compare your performance over time against yourself on that platform in consideration with your target audience and their affinity to the platform.

Understand who will be owners of the tools, who will have access? Sales team that may not have the time to use the tool in sept, analytics team? Look at what you can get out of exporting data. Due to platforms partnerships, you may have limited access to amount of data you can export. Knowing what data you can export will help Any analyst crushing the data in a way the UI may not able to. Ask if they offer professional services work, often these teams have access to back end data.

More than looking for features - really try to dig Into the Methodology of proprietary data. In general, you should focus on what value you want to bring to your business. What are the key strategic goals. Who are your competitors. You may not even know some analysis are possible. A good solution oriented sales team should be able to plug the gap and a great pre sales team should be able to demo some of these features for you with the wow factors.

Also considering the following: 1. Their relationships with the social media platforms. In order to have valuable software they have to work with social platforms to get access to their publishing API and their analytics API. If they don’t have strong relationships with these partners as social evolves and changes then the analytics platform will become useless. 2. Evaluate their receptiveness to incorporate customer feedback. If they are on the pulse of what marketers and social media managers need then they won’t be innovating fast enough to keep up with the changing digital landscape.

Do they have local cs teams in the ground that speaks your teams language? Do they have auto renewal terms? Do they have a six months check mark with one of their executive to make sure you get the most of your partnership? Do they have QBR in place to see where they can help you quarter on quarter?