Sysomos starts at $1,000 per month for a single seat, which might make your finger hover over the mouse button ready to click over to a review of something cheaper, but hold on a moment.
If you're involved in social media management and analytics for a large business or enterprise then not only should those numbers be within your budget, but you'd also be missing out on one of the best tools we've come across for big business social media.
While its price is both high and difficult to pin down, the rest of Sysomos is stellar.
The software is designed to process and analyze large amounts of social media data, up into millions of social conversations, hashtags, and users, and then deliver effective decision aids to help you run your sales and marketing campaigns.
Next to our other Editors' Choice winner, Synthesio, no social analytics tool does this better for enterprise-scale social data than Sysomos.
Sysomos includes a suite of primary modules to monitor conversations, keywords, and social trends; identify and organize groups of influencers, and use that information to target social audiences.
From advanced queries and social search to interactive data visualizations and reporting, Sysomos is on par with Synthesio and Crimson Hexagon ($2,000.00 at Software Advice) as a high-end enterprise social analytics platform.
Focusing in on its broad social listening capabilities and the ease of finding, categorizing, and reaching out to influencers, Sysomos earns a well-deserved Editors' Choice rating.
Pricing and Setup
With a new unified platform comes a new pricing structure.
Previously, the entire Sysomos suite of offerings could be purchased as the Sysomos Everything Together (SET) product.
At this time, Sysomos would only say that pricing starts at $1,000 per month for a single seat, with the price for additional seats going up from there.
They also said that there is a volume discount for enterprise scenarios but they would not elaborate any further.
This is a price increase from the $1,000 per month for 5 users that the platform costed when we first reviewed it.
The lack of pricing transparency is a knock against Sysomos, but it's not the first enterprise-scale vendor we've dealt with that keeps its pricing information close to the chest.
Sysomos is an expensive social listening solution, but the company gears its products for enterprise businesses that can afford a more powerful tool.
Small to midsize businesses (SMBs) should consider more affordable options such as BuzzSumo Agency (239.00 Per Month Billed Annually at BuzzSumo) and Editors' Choice Sprout Social ($149 Per User Per Month at Sprout Social) .
Setting up Sysomos is a straightforward process allowing for customization at every stage.
When logging into the main dashboard, the first thing you see is your search page.
Here, you can quickly research any topic, trends, brand, industry, or whatever else you feel like that you want to know more about (we'll take a closer look later in this review).
Across the side navigation bar are options for Search, Listen, Discover With Visual Monitor, Publish, Engage, Analyze, Insights, and My Workspaces.
The interface is fairly easy to navigate, and even nontechnical users should have little trouble getting up and running with the platform.
Sysomos also offer a Social Media API to integrate the platform with other systems, and includes a direct CRM integration with Salesforce (Visit Site at Salesforce.com) .
To create a new dashboard, I entered a name and immediately began adding widgets, which can pull data from a Heartbeat conversation, or from a specific social account you're monitoring on either Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.
For our demo account, Sysomos set us up with data from the Swedish furnite giant IKEA.
The widgets can also pull Instagram hashtags.
I added Daxdi's social accounts to the Monitor by typing in the name and handle, hitting search, and clicking Add.
Sysomos found the accounts right away.
From there, I created a custom dashboard with listening data from each account, as if I were a social media manager setting up a single hub from which to monitor a social presence.
When adding each widget, I chose the media type (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), selected the source account, and from there was given multiple widget options.
Twitter and Facebook widget options included a profile, the authority, gender, and geography of Daxdi's Twitter followers; a word cloud of the most prevalent keywords used by followers in their tweets and bios; and the latest activity, sentiment, or a Buzz Graph (explained below) of the Facebook audience.
Once created, I was able to easily drag and drop the widgets, change their size and the date range of the data they pulled in, and had options to either export the dashboard as a PDF file or click the gear icon on the top right-hand corner to share it with another user or clone the dashboard.
The dashboard setup process in Sysomos was among the easiest and most intuitive of the platforms we tested, offering the simplicity of a tool like Brand24 ($99.00 at Software Advice) with more detailed analytics.
There's also no limit on the number of monitors or dashboards you can create, as is also the case with Crimson Hexagon and Synthesio.
Social Listening and Monitoring
One of the most important factors when judging a platform's social listening capabilities is the power of its query engine.
The Search functionality was on par with the best social search features we tested.
Search is broken down into two tabs: Boolean and Source Specific.
In the Boolean tab, the simple search gives you fields to enter search keywords along with related terms to include and exclude.
From there it'll build a Boolean query for you with all the ANDs and ORs and parentheses that logic comes with.
The advanced Boolean search lets you build the query yourself up to 2,200 characters, which is a far cry from the million characters you get in Synthesio, but still perfectly sufficient for most complex social queries.
You can also add a number of additional filters to a search, including multiple geographic factors such as country, state, city, language, or domain, as well as by age group, social source, or by specific sub-keywords.
As a sample query to test the engine's ability to focus on specific social listening criteria within a larger topic area, I entered "mobile app development" as the main keyword phrase, with "Android" as a required keyword and "iOS," "iPhone," and "Windows" as excluded keywords.
I tried out different filters as well, refining results just by Twitter or solely to the USA, even trying out different age groupings such as 21-35 and 36-50.
After entering a simple query, Sysomos then displays how it looks in Boolean to help you understand how the query language works, a helpful feature for less experienced users.
The query results themselves are all interactive graphs and data visualizations you can sort by general analytics.
Or you can tab over each visualization to a rich list of mentions with embedded posts you can interact with and click into to open each post's source in a new tab.
Scrolling down the main analytics results, there's an interactive line graph showing mentions over the time period you've specified broken down by social source—blogs, forums, news, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.—a heat map of mentions by geographic location with accompanying bar chart, a word cloud, and a Buzz Graph, which I found to be the most unique and conceptually useful social listening feature in Sysomos.
Buzz Graphs give you a visual representation of how terms are correlated to one another.
Between each of the most popular keywords extracted from your query search, darker lines show words appearing together more often in conversations while gray, thinner, and dotted lines show lighter correlations.
The further out words are from the middle, the less they're correlated.
While simpler in execution than Crimson Hexagon's aesthetically ambitious topic wheels, waves, and clusters, Sysomos Buzz Graphs are the clearest representation I found of exactly how mentions are connected to help you understand and dissect social conversations.
Beyond the main search, Sysomos also includes a Compare feature to pit two Twitter accounts or two saved searches against each other.
It's a fairly standard comparison with graphs showing latest activity, age, gender, geography, sentiment, and share of voice.
The basic positive-negative-neutral sentiment metrics aren't as detailed as the sentiment analysis in Crimson Hexagon, and the share of voice chart is barebones compared to the psychographics and other community analysis features of Synthesio.
An enterprise social listening platform can't compete without a comparison tool, though, and Sysomos does the job.
Influencer Identification
On the Influencer side, Sysomos makes it relatively easy to find the most influential accounts primarily on Twitter, but including additional social sources for any given topic, sort them into lists, and then analyze and deploy those lists where you need them.
In the Influence tool, you can search by keyword or by a specific account's followers to pull up a dynamic list.
Influencer search results bring up interactive cards you can use to research a user, take a direct action with them, or sort them into a list.
On each card, you see how many followers the user has, how many times a day they tweet, and Klout score.
This information can be used to respresent how influential an account is and whether they are worth engaging with or not.
Clicking into each card gives you a personal word cloud and buzz graph for the user's most-tweeted phrases, and a list of top tweets from which you can view Tweet Life, one of the coolest features Sysomos has to offer that's also available in Twitter-specific search results.
Tweet Life shows the impressions of a user's tweet through a living representation of virality.
You see a tree visualization to show how a tweet has spread, with a depth chart showing the tweet's "half-life" and reach in the minutes, hours, and days since it was sent.
As instantaneous and fleeting as social media is (Twitter especially), Tweet Life is the most innovative feature we've seen.
It lets you quantify the radioactive representation of how viral a post is over time, something that's completely unique to all the social listening platforms we tested.
Aside from the default card view, the Influence tool also includes a graph view that breaks influencers into distinct "communities." The interactive concept graph represents communities around a keyword or account similarly to the Buzz Graph, with larger and smaller circles for influencers based on their scores, and webs of lines running between influencers to show who's following who and what accounts each community is based around to identify key influencers.
This feature is a useful way to represent influencers and followers, matching Synthesio for the most comprehensive community analysis, but it goes a step further by letting you to check a box and add specific communities to an influencer list.
Lists are the point of the Influence tool.
Once you've used the rich metrics to identify communities and influencers, press the big plus button atop the community breakdown or an influencer's card to add them to an existing list or create a new list with a short description.
From the lists tab on the top navigation bar, you can then export those targeted lists of influencers to other tools within Sysomos such as Heartbeat to run further queries, or as a CSV file to analyze in a business intelligence (BI) tool.
Smart Social Marketing and Teamwork
When we first tested Sysomos, the company placed built-in social publishing and post-curation in a separate product, called Sysomos Expion.
However, in its latest iteration, Sysomos has brought their publishing and post curation features under the main platform umbrella along with a few features that help it stand out.
Sysomos has an almost overwhelming selection of features, but helps the enterprise IT department manage the user experience by toggling modules and features on and off depending on job role and responsibility.
Those modules then create a Workspace, which you can build by hitting New Stack in the left-hand navigation bar.
To create, schedule, and publish posts, you can use the Publish module.
Sysosmos supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and popular international social networks such as China's Weibo.
Posting and scheduling is no-frills and straightforward, though once scheduled on the content calendar, there's no drag-and-drop post queue to quickly change posting time and order.
Publishing does include substantial multimedia support though, with the ability to attach anything from the native Content Manager (a library of uploaded images, videos, and more), as well as marketing calls-to-action (CTAs).
There's also an interesting option to publish content as a Dark Post, a Facebook-specific engagement tool for sending content to only a single targeted social audience based on demographics or a particular customer industry.
Sysomos is working on adding Dark Posting and Paid Analytics functionality (explained below) for Instagram, too.
Sysomos supports multiple team members, so there are also shared Workspaces.
Businesses have the option to set up an approval workflow for new posts, so a Workspace can include a queue of already-approved posts for the social media manager to schedule, or top-performing posts you want to throw back on the schedule.
Workspaces can also be cloned for users in the same group or with similiar responsibilities.
Of all the social tools we've tested, Sysomos has the best built-in collaboration and project management features allowing an entire social management or online marketing team consisting of both organic and paid content teams to work together on campaigns and day-to-day social operations.
Standard listening metrics—recent posts, keywords, brand mention tracking, influencers, and similar—are all available as streams in a Workspace, but you can also add specific paid analytics and real-time marketing tracking to the social command center.
Paid content, Facebook in particular, and marketing campaign analytics and reporting is where the platforms shines as a clear Editors' Choice.
From the Analyze module or the analytics tab within a Workspace, Sysomos provides a bevy of marketing and ROI...
