Sysomos Adds Facebook Feature To Social Media Monitoring Solution

When businesses are looking for social media monitoring services these days, they normally hone in on two or three capabilities. Because Facebook is this year’s blog, monitoring messages on the platform is a big one. While all social media monitoring services have the same access to Facebook data (it’s all dependent upon what Facebook makes public which is dictated by their terms of service), more creative ways to position Facebook data are surfacing.

Social media monitoring service Sysomos launches a new version of their Heartbeat product today which has a unique Facebook monitoring spin as its headline feature. In Sysomos’s new platform, you can click on a Facebook tab and see statistics and analysis for public Facebook pages and groups. The additional bell and whistle feature, though, is the ability to authorize Sysomos to access pages and groups you administer that you wish to set as private pages. So you can guard your brand’s page from public searches (relevant in few, but some instances) but still monitor and measure those interactions.

If you want Facebook to monitor a private fan group, you can now do that so long as you have administrative access or can get cooperation (and access) from the group owner for monitoring purposes.

Sysomos Heartbeat Video from Sysomos on Vimeo.

The development isn’t earth shattering, but is another step in advancing the social media monitoring industry. Congratulations to Sysomos and CEO Nick Koudas for the step.

The new Heartbeat features make Sysomos’s entry level offering mightily attractive for those looking for a solid social media monitoring solution. They like to sell their geo-targeting capabilities which other social media monitoring solutions steer clear of. It’s an interesting play since geo-targeting is largely based on IP addresses. If you’re using DirecTV’s satellite service at your home in Montana, your IP might show up as Los Angeles (for instance). This makes geo-targeting by more than country almost impossible. However, if you do get results for some states, say Montana, they’re probably people in Montana (as a guess) and that gives you a representative sample. Happy to have some technologists jump in here and correct my thinking on that.

What I do like about Sysomos’s Hearbeat offering is the pricing. The entry point is $500 per month plus a set-up fee and that gets you a certain number of queries and topics. There’s no volume pricing or add on fees for more users, etc. The prices double for twice as many queries and topics, but starting at $500 makes that still a relatively reasonable cost for most folks looking to monitor the social web.

And since we’ve not really covered Sysomos on SME to date, it’s probably good to tell our agency friends out there they have a very attractive monitoring solution for you. Sysomos MAP, the company’s core product, is positioned as a market research tool. Honestly, it didn’t seem to be all that different from Heartbeat to me except for the price. It starts at $2500 per month, but gives the subscriber unlimited access. So, if you’re an agency handling 10-15 clients, the MAP tool does the same stuff and can save you a bunch of money on your monitoring costs.

Sysomos was the first tool I’d seen in a while that impressed me with their drill down capabilities and graphics for charts and reports. I like their influencer graph which shows blogs and subsequent blogs influenced by them in a sort of planet-satellite view. They do have automated sentiment and tone scoring (a plus) and have the added bonus of translating anything in the tool into more languages that I thought existed.

Overall, it’s a solid offering at a competitive price. I’m only disappointed I didn’t review the tool before now. It’s well worth looking into if you’re looking for a social media monitoring solution.

Check out Sysomos’s website and blog. And watch the video above to see a mini demo of the new Heartbeat.

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