Social media has amplified the information explosion originally caused by the worldwide web. It is expected that in the year 2020, more than 40 zettabytes of digital information will be produced globally – that’s 5200GB of data for each person on the planet. And unsurprisingly, a large chunk of the data will relate to content shared through social media. For businesses, the situation poses both an opportunity and a challenge. While all the information can be used to better understand and address your target audience, the challenge lies in turning the data into insights.
Social media analytics tools help you convert unstructured data into actionable insights with relative ease, of course depending on which tool you choose to use. In this post, we compare Talkwalker and Crimson Hexagon to see whether one is better than the other and why.
What you can do with Talkwalker
With Talkwalker, all you have to do is define your brand, your competitors, and specify the relevant topics you would like to track. Based on your input, the tool identifies top tweets, blogs, conversations, and key influencers. It helps you visualize your global reach by analyzing social media activities across 10 platforms. You can make social media intelligence reports accessible to all teams within your organization by creating department-specific dashboards.
Talkwalker takes social media analytics to the next level by facilitating on competitive intelligence, which means that you can not only track your brand’s mentions on social media, but also benchmark your competitors.
The tool supports 187 languages and is effective in measuring performance and engagement on both earned and owned media. You can adapt Talkwalker’s sentiment analysis manually, and use tags to override the sentiment detected automatically by the tool.
It can also act as a central dashboard to track page analytics and KPIs such as activity, response rate, and community growth. By default, all results are displayed as per the levels of engagement, however, they can also be displayed in terms of potential reach, date published, last found, comments count, and channels, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Talkwalker’s latest solution IQ Apps makes a marked improvement on its existing offering, by making the process of gathering social intelligence much quicker and easier. It includes six apps – Brand Listening, Crisis, Social Channel Analytics, Advertising, Hashtag Campaigns and Competitive Intelligence – each tailored to meet a specific business need.
What you can do with Crimson Hexagon
Crimson Hexagon is a useful tool in understanding consumer behavior and discovering consumer opinion. In a feature called Affinities, the tool visualizes the people participating in a conversation on social media. Like Talkwalker, it provides a real-time view of brand conversations, which is extremely significant, particularly in a crisis management situation.
The tool helps identify patterns in opinion creation and assists in understanding people, rather than just their conversations. It works based on sample inputs you create, which makes it flexible. You can train the tool to analyze monitors according to specific parameters, and categorize conversations as per sentiments.
However the demographic data Crimson Hexagon collates is limited to categorization by gender, which means you can’t use the tool to classify post lists based on filters such as source or date of publication. It offers a wealth of data for brand marketers, but wielding insights out of it requires the knowledge and skill of an expert.
The verdict
Crimson Hexagon is a sophisticated tool, but lacks simplicity. Talkwalker scores higher for being able to churn meaningful insights from complex data through an intuitive user interface. The process of creating and training monitors on Crimson Hexagon is laborious. Using the tool and understanding how it works requires sustained effort.
In contrast to Crimson Hexagon, which displays sample results, Talkwalker shows all analytical results. Also priced more competitively, Talkwalker is a Twitter Certified Program and offers a dynamic set of solutions, including creating topic filters, blocking sources, adding source panels, and classifying sources. If you’re looking for a social media analytics tool that reduces effort without compromising on the quality of results, pick Talkwalker.