Social media marketing can definitely be far more efficient, easier and equally effective if tech-savvy marketers show the discretion in choosing right set of feature-rich and business friendly tools. These are extremely helpful when it comes to precise monitoring and analysis of different customer-driven online channels.

We have already discussed in the previous posts several handy tools such as Radian6, Spredfast, HootSuite, Salesforce.com, CoTweet, and SocialTALK. Most of these serve as social media reporting, engagement & management solutions. They allow marketers to manage social media conversations from a centralized dashboard. I shall throw light on Social Radar, truPULSE, Viralheat and Sentiment Metrics in the concluding post of this particular series.

Social Radar

• The service collects messages and articles from diverse online resources, offering historical content. Its proprietary crawler can collect social content from users sharing thoughts, reviews, information, and opinions on blogs, forums, news outlets, and social networks.
• The SR Alerts package is aimed at monitoring conversation fluctuations, key topics from designated influencers as well as sentiment analysis. The tool though, costs $200 a month onwards.

truPULSE

• truPULSE monitors and listens to conversations revolving around certain keywords or topics from Facebook, Twitter, video sites, blogs and RSS feeds. With truPULSE, marketers can efficiently track the perceptions of a brand amongst prospects and even competitors.
• It can highlight peculiar customer service issues and instantly alert about a crisis situation that B2B marketers can handle before it escalates further. They can also use it as a way of getting a lead or pitch.

Viralheat

• This is a well-known social media monitoring & analytics service that monitors Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages, Google Buzz, the real-time Web as well as viral video statistics, if needed.
• One aspect in which it differs from other avenues is its option to restrict profiles by location (this can be significant if B2B is local or striving to target a certain location or sector). It has its own API as well, which means that marketers can make it extensible and look to integrate Viralheat into some other already existing business solutions.

Sentiment Metrics

• Sentiment analysis tool settings can indeed be useful for B2B marketers. Managing a host of Twitter mentions about a certain product, service or brand without context is not going to be of much help. Sentiment Metrics is aimed at the enterprise and larger businesses. It can be equally helpful to B2B marketers.
• It can monitor not only networking sites, but also umpteen online forums, review sites and blogs. While prospective users might want to know about specific product offerings on Facebook or Twitter, more in-depth conversations often occur on blogs or in forums. Monitoring these niche areas for both mentions and sentiment analysis can be quite insightful for a brand.

What is your experience of the various social media tools that you may have encountered and used as part of your online marketing and communication strategy? Do share your precious feedback for benefit of other readers and social media users…