The report says there are too few differentiators and not enough integrated use of the data across the entire enterprise.

Barry Levine on August 30, 2018 at 5:15 pm

The coverage by social listening tools is expanding beyond social networks, but there are few clear differentiators between vendors and social data is still not extensively utilized across customer companies.

Those are some of the main takeaways from the new Forrester Wave quarterly report, “Q3 2018 Global Social Listening Platforms.” (Available as a free download from some of the mentioned vendors, such as Talkwaker or Synthesio, both of which require user registration.)

“In our 2016 Forrester Wave ™ evaluation of social listening platforms,” authors Jessica Liu and Arleen Chien write in the newest report, “we acknowledged that the technology had great potential, but its heyday was still to come. We’re still holding our breath in 2018.”

One of the ongoing issues, Forrester says, is that marketing “still primarily owns and uses social data in a silo,” although brands are combining social data with data from other sources, such as market research, audience segmentation and digital ad targeting. But social data is not commonly integrated with, say, call center transcripts, traditional ad targeting, human resources data or in-store data.

Additionally, the data sources tend to be similar across vendors, not only because they draw from the same social networks but because they utilize the same third-party aggregators for social content on web sites, such as LexisNexis or Factiva for news and TVEyes for broadcast TV comments.

A recent report from Engagement Labs pointed out that insights obtained just from social data are often not representative of the larger discussion offline. By including offline data in the picture, social listening platforms could provide a more accurate Big Picture.

Read the full MarTech Today article, here.

For more information on TotalSocial^®  or to request a demo, visit www.engagementlabs.com

For sales contact us at: sales@engagementlabs.com

For media inquires contact us at: media@engagementlabs.com

About TotalSocial^®

Want a better understanding of the online and offline conversations around your brand? Are you a journalist who wants to use real data to measure the brands you’re reporting on? Are you a company who wants to gain further insights into your brand's marketing strategies to develop effective campaigns to reach your audiences?