My take: Talkwalker
A powerful and affordable social media analytics & monitoring platform.
Over the years I used small, often free, niche solutions for social media monitoring and analytics. By nature, those tend to lack the holistic perspective and set of features required to understand your audience across a wide array of social channels, and lack the integration to business outcomes typically found through web analytics platforms and back-office data.
I also used the so-called “leading” platforms such as Radian6 and explored the capabilities of very expensive alternatives such as Sysomos. The problem with those social media analytics and monitoring platforms is the gross underestimation of the time it takes to configure and tweak the tool, the skilled resources you need in order to leverage the surfaced data, and the shameful lack of action resulting from what should be invaluable insight.
Talkwalker offers a fresh new(er), affordable alternative that makes it super easy to get going and offer very powerful features you can readily act on.
The 15 Minutes Topics Setup
When I have the opportunity to evaluate a solution I don’t want the pre-packaged glittering sales pitch, I want to go through the test of fire and truly use it on my own. I turned to one of my lovely clients, an NGO providing quality content for pregnant mothers and parents of children up to 8 years old. The site receives a good amount of traffic, they have a strong user base and a vivid social media presence. On top of that, they target a French-speaking audience, an area where most monitoring platforms fails. Talkwalker being an European-headquartered (Luxembourg to be precise, with offices in New York and San Francisco) company, they obviously take the language considerations at heart.
Topics
Setting up the topics was a breeze using a syntax similar to AdWords. I tried different groups: a custom-built search query, one based on the AdWords keywords, and another built from Google Search Console search terms. It would be nice if Talkwalker offered to automatically import those configurations, but nevertheless, it was easy to simply copy & paste the criteria.
Channels
Setting up channels, whether owned, competing or general sources of interest is a breeze. Talkwalker is compatible with a multitude of social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, G+, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest to name a few popular ones — there are many more or you can paste your own links (such as blogs or news sites).
That’s all you need to get going. There are other configs like Events, to specify known activities that could affect your data stream, and you can create additional custom filters to further refine the data coming through the topic filters.
Killing Three Birds With One Stone
Once empowered with a tool like Talkwalker, you should initially focus on one of those three areas:
- Content impact: see how specific content and topics resonates with your audience. Here, you also want to identify and nurture the relationship with your top brand advocates. The recently introduced integration with Google Analytics now allows you to see how social media impact website traffic;
- Marketing impact: improve the marketing strategy and brand health by allocating budgets toward the right tactics, aligned with the right content and call to action;
- Business impact: measure how the above two points contributes to the core mission of the organization, whatever that might be. Here, the GA integration becomes even more interesting as it ties social media much more clearly to actual business outcomes.
For the sake of my test, I restricted myself to content impact analysis.
Leveraging Social Insight
Many marketers are trying to justify what happened in the past, instead of acting on what is going on right now, or foreseeing what’s coming up. A platform such as Talkwalker provides invaluable input to better understand your audience desires and concerns, as well as their lifecycle across channels. Most social analytics solutions provide info about so-called “influencers” — which Talkwalker obviously do — but it goes beyond by facilitating and bringing efficiencies in the way you can interact with your general audience.
With the Google Analytics integration, you can leverage Talkwalker intelligence and see how specific social interactions are impacting traffic or business outcomes on the website.
My Take
Starting at less than $10,000 per year, I have already recommended Talkwalker to many of my clients. In this article, I barely touched on its core features, but Talkwalker also includes many unique and very powerful capabilities:
- Global data coverage from the inception of the tool — not an after thought;
- Image recognition, so your brand can be detected when presented in pictures;
- Forecasting and regression capabilities;
- Data intelligence hub, sharing and collaboration — the use-case approach nicely answers the “writer’s block” syndrome often faced when starting with such a solution;
Give it a try yourself, in just a few minutes you can have your own personalized trial.
Stéphane Hamel is a seasoned independent consultant, teacher and speaker. He shares his passion for digital analytics — be it technical ‘how to’ or assessing organizations’ digital capabilities and maturity.
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