As of this writing, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.2 billion websites being accessed by over 3 billion people around the world. It is literally impossible for anyone to keep track of them all in any sort of meaningful fashion. But as a business owner or Internet marketer, you need to keep tabs on what people are saying online. How do you do it?
A tool that you should consider adding to your arsenal is SentiOne, a solution that is trusted by over 2,000 brands in 26 countries, including Groupon, Huawei, Proctor and Gamble, and Gillette.
A Smarter Way to Listen
The goal of SentiOne is to provide you with the means to monitor the expanses of the Internet for not only mentions of your brand, but just about whatever you’d like, including keeping tabs on the competition and helping you zero in on leads that could turn into customers.
What’s very important to note here is that this advanced “social listening” doesn’t occur on any sort of lag. You’re not receiving information about what happened online yesterday. The results are delivered in real time with wide market coverage and sophisticated technology, offering results in 24 languages.
Through this technology, you gain access to over 20 billion mentions in real time. These mentions are indexed by SentiOne crawlers and stored on their servers. You simply build up your query (in just one step) and the engine takes care of the rest. From there, you can filter and sort to get at exactly the data you seek.
Analyze Brand Sentiment
The net that SentiOne casts to capture these mentions is remarkably wide, covering everything from forums to microblogs, Facebook to Google+, portals to Instagram. They scour everywhere and bring all that information together. But this is much more than just a simple search.
The smart technology is able to determine the general sentiment of the mention — whether it is positive, negative, and neutral — and tracking these trends over time to see how your brand is faring online. The data can break down even further through the convenient dashboard, visualizing the top domains and offering a gender analysis.
Through further user analytics, you can identify opinion leaders in your niche. This can reveal tremendous opportunities for influencer marketing, for instance, or how you may choose to revise your overall marketing strategy to better approach your ideal customer.
Getting Started and Browsing Mentions
It literally only takes a few quick clicks of the mouse to get setup with SentiOne. Once you’ve created your account — they offer a free 14 day trial with the ability to run one test project — you can get started with creating your first project. As an aside, when setting up your account for the first time, you will be asked for your target market. The options focus exclusively on European regions like Estonia, Bulgaria, and Germany.
You’ll be asked to set your objective first. Would you like to monitor the web for your brand (or your competitor’s), social media profile activity, or something else. In my test, I chose the first the option as it is likely the most common and most popular. Once I established the brand I wanted to monitor, I was already up and running.
Slowly browsing through over 37,000 mentions would take far too much time and effort, of course. That’s why looking at the overall trends described above is worthwhile. That said, it is also very worthwhile to dig through this data even further.
Along the left side of the “mentions” section, you can filter through the mentions and sort them based on either when they were created or the size of the reach. Maybe you want to look only at mentions using photos and video. Maybe you’re only interested in what female users are saying or what the male negative reaction on a forum looks like. It’s entirely up to you and this can all yield some great insight.
A Social CRM Too
Another very notable aspect of the SentiOne solution is something called SalesLift. What you get here is a customer relationship management (CRM) solution that’s geared toward the social web. This makes it much easier for you to nurture those relationships, build them into leads, and develop those connections into long-term customers and supporters.
It’s not out of the ordinary for some people to contact a company via social media, typically through Twitter or Facebook. These kinds of direct mentions are pretty easy for you to pick up, but what about all those other instances where they’re talking about your brand but you don’t notice?
When you leverage SaleLift, you are able to monitor posts that may be of interest you mere moments after being posted on the Internet. This isn’t just about brand mentions, because maybe they’re just talking about something related to your industry and they’re looking for help. That’s where you can swoop in to say you’ve got the perfect product or service for the job.
The other part of it is that conversations can easily get buried beneath one another, especially on the social web, so it’s easy to forget what you’ve already talked about with this person. SalesLift lets you archive these conversations for more effective communication. Utilize the built-in funnel management features to convert leads into clients.
How Much Does It Cost?
The SentiOne plan that you choose will be based primarily on the number of users and the number of projects that you need.
The personal plan is for “essential monitoring” and is priced at 49 Euro per month. While you get to watch unlimited keywords and mentions, you are limited to just one user, one market, and three projects. Instant historical data is stored for up to six months. The team plan, at 149 Euro per month, is likely the most popular, allowing for up to 10 users and five projects, as well as 12 months of instant historical data.
Beyond that, you will need to contact SentiOne for a customizable Enterprise plan. Depending on your precise needs, you can have as many users as you’d like, as many projects as you’d like, and the possibility of monitoring up to 27 markets. You also unlock a number of additional features, like a multimedia dashboard, high profile queries, data exports, qualitative reports, thread management and more.
All plans are offered with a 20% discount when you bill yearly.