The larger the marketing campaign, the more exhaustive its data gathering needs to be, particularly around the KPIs associated with social media analytics.
In a globe-spanning campaign series, that can means massive quantities of data that need to be parsed fast for effective decision making, and in that scenario it's hard to find a better offering than Synthesio, which starts at $1,200 per month.
Along with fellow enterprise Editors' Choice winner, Sysomos, Synthesio offers not only excellent overall social media management, but also more targeted social listening and influencer identification tools.
The platform even goes beyond the usual suite of social media targets to encompass other corners of Internet traffic.
It does all of this with some of the most creative data visualization features, business-focused metrics, and out-of-the-box tools in its class.
All that makes it a clear Editors' Choice winner in the social media management space.
Pricing and Setup
Synthesio's pricing structure is based on the number of dashboards each customer licenses along with varying levels of setup and ongoing support for a given enterprise client.
Dashboards are configured per use case; for instance, a Synthesio dashboard on competitive analysis, crisis management, or campaign management.
Customers begin with a smaller number of dashboards with custom setup for a starting price of around $1,200 per month.
On the higher end, Synthesio counts many larger global brands as customers and states some clients maintain more than 50 dashboards.
Once a business buys a license for a Synthesio dashboard, there are no limits on scaling up users, data storage, or the scope of analytics searches.
Rather than a lower-priced but less robust option like Brand24 ($99.00 at Software Advice) that gives you more search and storage capacity as you move up tiers, once you fork over the cash for a dashboard Synthesio gives you unlimited ad-hoc and saved searches, unlimited queries with no cap on multiple keywords and sub-topics, and unlimited users.
Along with Sysomos, Crimson Hexagon ($2,000.00 at Software Advice) and the more expensive tiers of Talkwalker, Synthesio is a social media analytics tool targeting enterprises with large social presences, and does not contain built-in publishing capabilities.
It does, however, offer a fully open application programming interface (API) for businesses to enable custom integrations with publishing platforms and other third-party services.
Synthesio integrates with tools including Hootsuite , Salesforce (Visit Site at Salesforce.com) , Facebook Insights, Marketo, and Conversocial, among others.
Small to midsize businesses (SMBs) looking for a more affordable analytics platform that can also serve as a third-party social publishing tool should consider Sprout Social ($149 Per User Per Month at Sprout Social) , our Editors' Choice for SMBs.
The Synthesio team works with customers to build each company's custom dashboard or dashboards during setup, but also offers dashboard creation functionality that I found intuitive and easy to use.
In the Build tab of the left-hand Synthesio navigation, the interface takes you through a six-step dashboard creation and design process all compacted down into one page.
First, you specify the time period over which you want social data and the countries and languages you'd like the data to represent.
You then use the query builder to add brand names or keywords, along with associated and excluded keywords to make the search more complex.
Brand24 Premium builds queries in the same fashion.
Synthesio also includes the capability to write more complex queries using Boolean logic.
Synthesio then lets you toggle the different social media types and data sources your business would like to measure, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, specific Twitter accounts and keywords, Instagram hashtags, YouTube channels and keywords, Pinterest, and the Russian social networking site VKontakte.
The media types section is also where you pull in all sorts of other assorted data from around the Internet, from news outlets and governments to blogs, forums, and comments sections.
Email alerts can be set for triggering by positive, negative, or all mentions, by the specific campaigns you're tracking, or by country in real time or on specific dates and times.
From there, each page of the custom dashboard has drag-and-drop widgets along with a list of templates or preconfigured standard views from which to choose.
Analytics Galore
Once the dashboard is operational, the list of analytics tools is extensive, and spans far beyond the core mentions, engagement, reach, and influencer analytics that serve as the primary metrics for most of the other platforms I tested.
In fact, Synthesio knocks those metrics out right away in the Listen tab, which serves as an ad hoc query interface to social data.
This is where I performed many keyword and topic searches within one of Synthesio's campaigns, in this case searching real data from Coca-Cola's "Share a Coke" campaign.
Synthesio lets you write queries up to a million characters in length.
The interface then shows you the frequency of those keywords over a given timeframe in either line graph or word cloud form across different social campaigns and media types.
I found Synthesio's Listen tab gave me the richest query results on keyword searches of all the platforms I tested.
The filtering went far deeper than Brand24 Premium without as much back-end tinkering as is required for the same granular control in Talkwalker.
Crimson Hexagon's Buzz Monitor offers similarly rich functionality on basic metrics like mentions, but it's not quite as centralized right at the top of the platform as with Synthesio.
Synthesio's listening has also been greatly improved with the addition of Synthesio Beam, a new real-time social dashboard.
Beam provides real-time graphics of customer satisfaction, overall "buzz," and the possibility that a post will go viral.
The Beam dashboard includes a direct competitive module as well, to measure specific metrics and influence scores against competing brands.
This kind of real-time monitoring is also enhanced by the addition of a new reporting and alerting module allowing users to create multiple alerts per dashboard, which can include emojis and images in the email alerts.
In the mention feed beneath the listening graphs, each social post relevant to the query comes with an analysis including geolocation, basic sentiment, and a Synthesio Rank from 1 to 10 including decimal points.
It's part of the platform's in-house influencer algorithm that factors in not just activity and reach, but an influencer's relative authority on the topic in question.
In the Influencers section further down the navigation, I was able to calculate scores across one or more social networks as well, and gave some of the highest-rated influencers a star to designate them for a "favorite audience," which I then exported as a CSV list for use in future campaigns.
As a result, when I searched for several individual Twitter users in a different campaign dashboard on brand perception of Apple Watch, the ones who had relevant posts to both campaigns had different ranks in each depending on how often they posted about that topic.
Synthesio and Sysomos were the only platforms I tested that factored in that kind of contextual influence metric, though Sysomos gets the overall edge in influencer identification with its dynamic and look-alike lists to intelligently grow audience lists with automated machine learning.
Synthesio is great at identifying influencers, but Sysomos actually takes proactive steps within the platform to grow your audience and formulate targeted campaigns with that data without the user lifting a finger.
Synthesio has also improved its influencer identification recently by expanding the influencer widget to filter beyond media type, topic, country, or date, and sort by overall influencer score, number of mentions, average sentiment, Synthesio's proprietary SynthesioRank influencer metric, total tweets and followers, and more.
Clicking on an influencer reveals detailed information about that user in Full Story view, and clicking on the mention count for a given user reveals a sub-dashboard showing all the mentions from that user.
Users can also designate specific influencers as their "favorites" by clicking on the star next to the influencer to add them to the Favorite Influencers list, which is exportable.
The rest of Synthesio's analytics and social listening features can essentially be broken into two categories: data visualization and presentation reports, and community analysis tools.
The data visualization capabilities include the platform's word clouds, Insight Tree, and different interactive maps charting mentions and conversations worldwide.
All data and pages can be exported as CSV or PNG files.
The word clouds are simply designed in a basic gray color scheme, but when hovering over a word all other related words in the cloud will turn blue, showing which keywords are often grouped together in posts.
When I clicked on a word in the cloud, it opened a pop-up box with a full listening dashboard including a timeline graph, query engine, and post feed.
From the word clouds in Crimson Hexagon and Talkwalker, all I got when I clicked on a word was an unfiltered post feed.
The Insight Tree is similar, but rather than a cloud it displays words in a progression of clusters.
For instance in the Coke campaign, the Insight Tree showed users first posting words like "Coke," "share," "bottles," and "order." Subsequent posts included groupings of words such as "coupon," "friend," and "send." Overall, Crimson Hexagon's keyword visualizations were more sleekly designed with better interactive manipulation, but Synthesio's let you go deeper.
The trees and word clouds are generated from 10,000 mentions over a specified time period, and can be filtered by country or by positive, negative, or neutral sentiment.
These word visualizations with native links to deeper-dive metrics are an example of Synthesio going outside the box compared to the other analytics platforms with how it presents social data to the social curators, marketers, or executives within a business.
Synthesio also offers similar interactive global mapping functionality to Crimson Hexagon, Sysomos, and Talkwalker, but again goes a bit further.
Rather than one blanket world map showing post concentration and heat mapping around a given topic, Synthesio offers both a world map and a Twitter Heat Map dedicated solely to mentions in the immediacy-focused microblogging network.
The platform also includes reach and demographics tabs specifically for Twitter.
Both Synthesio's Twitter Heat Map and Talkwalker's world map are fully integrated with Google Maps, so I was able to zoom all the way into precise geolocations to see where a mention originated.
In the World Map, Synthesio again pops out a full mention dashboard when you click into each country.
Deep Social Audience Breakdown
Synthesio's community analysis capabilities fall under its analytics banner as well, but are worth their own section in this review.
The first of those capabilities is Psychographics.
Filtered by country, social campaign, and sentiment over a given date range, Synthesio's Psychographics, defined as the study of personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles, breaks a social audience down into "communities" based on user occupations or professional fields.
When I ran psychographics on the "Share a Coke" campaign in the United States, the platform generated a bubble chart with nearly two dozen communites spanning "Finance and Investment," "Communication and Marketing," "Sports," "Health," and many others.
The largest community was "IT & Technology," with a large blue circle within that bubble indicating the majority of that community originated from Reddit.
This sort of breakdown is similar to the way Talkwalker uses Smart Themes to drill down and refine complex queries, but applied more broadly to an entire social audience.
The Ecosystem tab provides a similar sort of breakdown, taking those communities and breaking them up into the top users, blogs, forums, and news outlets making up each one.
The result is a sort of interconnected wheel of data sources, where hovering over each one highlights the inbound, outbound, and mutual links that source is responsible for.
These community analysis capabilities are intuitively designed and help connect social media analytics to market research and inbound marketing in a way none of the other platforms I tested did.
Synthesio has also added demographic breakdown capabilities by "Affinities" such as Automotive, Fashion & Beauty, Science, Sports, Politics, Food & Drink, Technology, and Music to further slice and dice targeted audiences.
Synthesio has pulled even further ahead in audience breakdown and social analysis with Reveal, a new data visualization tool within the platform providing a drag-and-drop pivot table interface for raw social data.
Reveal gives users the ability to create and analyze their own custom social metrics by combining data attributes with granular filters.
Reveal is designed t to help users better identify viral trends, and is geared toward social marketers and C-Suite executives to provide greater social business intelligence (BI) to make more informed business decisions.
When it comes to demographics and deep-dive data analysis, Brand24, BuzzSumo Agency (239.00 Per Month Billed Annually at BuzzSumo) , Crimson Hexagon, and Talkwalker stop at age, gender, and race.
Buffer for Business doesn't offer any audience demographics.
Sysomos goes a bit deeper with its scatterplot "communities" visualization breaking influencers into groups, but still doesn't profile the audience quite as deeply.
Synthesio's clear edge in this category is one of the prime reasons it's our Editors' Choice for enterprises.
Return On Your Social Investment
The last section of analytics tools Synthesio provides is labeled "ROI," better known as return on investment.
The key to a great business-focused social media analytics platform is how it ties the massive audience and data streams coming from these platforms back into the organization's core business model.
Or to put it in even simpler terms, are you getting what you paid for and is what you're getting worth what you...
